Hawaii Travel Guide

Hawai‘i is the most isolated island chain on Earth — a run of volcanic islands sitting some 2,400 miles from the nearest mainland, out on its own in the middle of the Pacific. Of its 137 islands, only seven are inhabited, and each one carries its own weather, culture and coastline. In a single day here you can move from reef to rainforest to the flank of an active volcano.

We spent a month across O‘ahu and the Big Island, splitting our time between the water and the people who know it best — dive legends who've been here 40 years, native Hawaiian (kānaka maoli) elders, ocean scientists and pro surfers. What follows is what we'd tell a friend before they go: how to get here, when to come, what to eat, where the wild things are, and how to travel this place with your eyes open.

Almost everyone lands first at Honolulu (HNL) on O‘ahu — it's the main gateway from the mainland and the hub for hopping between islands. From there it's a short inter-island flight to Kona (KOA) or Hilo on the Big Island, Kahului (OGG) on Maui, or Līhu‘e (LIH) on Kaua‘i. Getting here is the easy part.

Getting around is where it pays to plan. Outside Waikiki and the resort strips, public transport is thin, so a rental car is what turns a trip into an expedition — the drive from O‘ahu's sleepy North Shore to the bustle of Waikiki is barely an hour but feels like two different worlds. Book the car early; on the smaller islands they sell out.

You can dive and travel Hawai‘i year-round, but the two halves of the year feel completely different. Winter (roughly December–April) brings the humpback whales — you'll often hear them singing straight through a dive — and the giant North Shore swells that make O‘ahu the center of the surfing world (it's when the WSL's Pipe Pro runs at Banzai Pipeline). The trade-off is colder water and bigger, rougher surf on north-facing shores.

Summer flips it: calmer, clearer water and the easiest diving conditions of the year. The Kona manta feed and the blackwater "pelagic magic" run all year regardless. If you want the islands quieter, September and January are the least crowded months.

Eat where the locals line up. On O‘ahu's North Shore the food trucks are the whole point — cold açaí bowls and the island-famous garlic shrimp, served out of clusters of trucks between surf breaks. Across the islands the staples are poke (raw ‘ahi, done a dozen ways), the plate lunch, kalua pig, and shave ice to close it out.

The one to seek out with intention: limu, Hawaiian seaweed. We went hunting for Limu Kohu (Asparagopsis taxiformis) in the Big Island tide pools with a local forager who called it the "supreme seaweed" — prized in Hawaiian cooking long before the rest of the world caught on.

Where you base yourself sets the whole tone. O‘ahu splits hard: the North Shore is a slow, surf-devoted stretch of small towns and food trucks; Waikiki, an hour south, is high-rise, high-energy and closer to the mainland it left behind. On the Big Island, Kona is the base for the manta and blackwater diving, and one of the islands' fastest-growing hubs.

Our bias, everywhere we go, is to stay small and local — locally-run places close to the water over the big resort footprints. It keeps more of your money in the community and puts you closer to the people worth talking to. A few well-rated bases across the tiers, on the two islands we spent our time:

Because Hawai‘i is so far from anywhere, life here evolved in isolation — around a quarter of its reef fish exist nowhere else on Earth. The headliners are easy to love: green sea turtles (honu) hauling out on volcanic shorelines, humpback whales through the winter, and manta rays sweeping moonlit plankton feeds off Kona.

Look closer and it gets stranger, and more fragile. Endangered Hawaiian monk seals — one of the rarest seals on the planet, down to around 1,100 — rest on quiet beaches. Tide pools hold fifteen-plus species of seaweed. And in the open black water offshore, the nightly vertical migration lifts up creatures most people never see. Inland, the same islands climb from reef to rainforest to active, smoking volcano.

Yes — and it's some of the most singular diving anywhere on Earth. Hawai‘i sits alone in the middle of the Pacific, so the water drops into true open ocean fast and around a quarter of the reef fish you'll see here live nowhere else. We logged most of our dives out of Kona on the Big Island, where two things happen that you simply can't do the same way anywhere else: the manta night dive, and blackwater.

On the Kona manta night dive, you drop at dusk and settle on the sand while a ring of dive lights pulls up a bloom of plankton — and the mantas come in to feed, barrel-rolling inches over your head, dozens of them on a good night. After dark it gets stranger. Blackwater — what the Kona crew at Jack's Diving Locker call "pelagic magic" — is a tethered drift over thousands of feet of open water, lights down, waiting for the nightly vertical migration to rise up to meet you: comb jellies firing light down their cilia, siphonophores trailing tentacles 30-odd feet long, larval fish and lobsters, the pelagic seahorse found only in these waters, and — if the ocean's feeling generous — the paper nautilus. It's the closest thing to floating in space we've found underwater. Winter water runs cold enough that we packed heat warmers into our wetsuits and hung dead-still for 90 minutes, letting it come to us.

Beyond Kona the chain has real range. Molokini, off Maui, is a half-sunk volcanic crater and a protected Marine Life Conservation District; Lāna‘i's Cathedrals are lava chambers lit by shafts of light like stained glass; O‘ahu is the wreck capital, with the Sea Tiger and a 1946 Corsair sitting upright on the sand; and the drift dives off Moloka‘i put you in the path of endangered Hawaiian monk seals and hammerheads. Water sits around 75–80°F (24–27°C) with 75–100 ft of visibility, and from roughly December to April you'll often hear humpback whales singing straight through the dive.

One honest note, because we'd want it ourselves: the reefs here are stressed by warming and land runoff, and it shows. The bright spot is local — we dove with an O‘ahu community rebuilding their own bay through "Corals of Opportunity." Come with reef-safe sunscreen and hold your expectations loosely; the real magic here is in the small, strange, otherworldly stuff, not the postcard.

Go in with your eyes open: Hawai‘i is under real pressure. The reefs are stressed by warming water and land runoff, and it shows underwater. Tourism is both the lifeline and the strain — roughly 9.6 million visitors a year, the number-one economic driver in the islands, on land that's increasingly bought up by the ultra-wealthy (Larry Ellison owns 98% of Lāna‘i). The 2023 Lahaina fire, which killed over 100 people and destroyed some 2,300 buildings, sits heavy over any conversation about the islands' future.

The hope, like everywhere we go, is local. We dove with an O‘ahu community rebuilding their own bay through "Corals of Opportunity," and spent time on the Big Island with Symbrosia, whose seaweed-based feed additive can cut livestock methane by over 90%. The frontline solutions here are homegrown — and worth going out of your way to support.

The single most useful thing we heard in Hawai‘i wasn't about gear or itineraries — it was "talk story." It's the Hawaiian way of passing on wisdom, and it means the best thing a visitor can do is slow down, listen, and learn the islands' history from the people who live it. As one native Hawaiian we met, Heather Kahaulani Remo, told us: come "with a heart ready to understand, respect, and positively enhance our community."

The practical version is simple. Reef-safe sunscreen, always. Keep your distance from turtles, monk seals and mantas. Book local operators and eat at local spots. Support the community reef and conservation projects doing the hard work. And learn a little of the real history before you come — the colonization, the once-banned language, the fight to keep the culture alive — so you show up as a guest, not just a consumer.