Hawaii

My essay is about the 50th state of the USA, about Hawaii. When people hear about Hawaii, they imagine it as a very exotic place. But it’s quite difficult to find someone who have visited these islands. Journey to Hawaii is long and boring. You have to fly to New York with over-landing in Helsinki, then fly to LA, where you have to stay over night. Next day is one more flight ahead, from LA to Honolulu, capital of Hawaii. After five hours of flying above ocean, captain of airplane says that you’ll be landing in few minutes. During landing, you can see Pearl Harbor on the left side. After landing you realize that you are in paradise. Airport doesn’t have any windows, because of hot weather. After getting off the airplane, you’ll get flower necklace, typical for Hawaii.
Hawaii is completely different not only from Europe, but also from US main land. The 1,500 mile-long Hawaiian chain consists of 132 islands, reefs, and shoals. The eight largest, with which most people are familiar, are at the southeastern end. Island of Oahu is second smallest of the four major islands in geographical size. Hawaii has over one million inhabitants. Surprisingly, tree fourths of the state’s population lives on Oahu. Honolulu, Capital of Hawaii, is also located on this island. Most people live in Honolulu and Pearl City with famous Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is one of the greatest attraction on Oahu. You can visit museum of Pearl Harbor and Arizona Memorial. It’s possible to see ships, which were destroyed in Battle of Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941..
Everybody, who goes to Hawaii, wants to visit Waikiki, one of the most famous beaches in the world. When I saw it, I couldn’t understand why it’s so popular. It’s quite small beach with plenty of people on it. Only advantage of Waikiki beach is hot water without waves. Temperature of water in summer is approximately 30 °C. It’s also great place for surfers, because, there are about half an meter high waves 100 meter far away from shore.
Behind Waikiki beach you find Kalakaua avenue, one kilometer long street with many malls, shops, banks and fast foods. It’s not only tourist center of Hawaii, but also center of night life with many bars, restaurants, pubs and discos. At 10 p.m., this street is as busy as Venceslav square at 3 p.m. Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood can be found there.
Ten to fifteen minutes of walking from Waikiki is Ala Moana Center, the largest open-air shopping center in the world with 180 stores and over 7.800 parking places. Downtown of Honolulu is about 1 mile away from Ala Moana. It’s part of Honolulu with skyscrapers and china town.
But Hawaii is not only Waikiki and Honolulu. It’s also part of nature. If you want to get familiar with it, you have to leave Honolulu. On the East of Oahu, there is Hanauma bay. Hanauma bay is an underwater park. You swim between hundreds of fishes. Sometimes you have even problems to take picture of your friend under water (with waterproof camera) , because between you and your friend are so many fishes that your friend couldn’t be seen on the picture. On the other hand, you can visit real rain forest on the same island. It rains there every 15 minutes, so it’s little uncomfortable hiking, but the wild nature is very exciting.
Let’s move to the Big Island, sometimes also called Hawaii. It’s the biggest island with the largest active volcano in the world. One half of this island looks like Moon landscape, second half of this island is mostly covered by rain forests with many waterfalls. Some of them are more than 50 meter high. More interesting is, of course, part with volcanoes. You can see there something you won’t see anywhere else in the world - roads covered by real lava. Yes, it’s true. You are driving and suddenly there is end of the road. But not common end as you know it from other countries. There is two meter high layer of lava over the road.
Speaking of volcanoes, I know interesting story about it. We’ve visited small museum on the side of the greatest crater (2 km in diameter). There were some seismographs placed in this museums. Above them there was notation like this: “How do we recognize that volcano eruption is coming? There are many very light earthquakes, which people cannot feel, before volcano eruption is coming”. I looked at the seismograph and realized that there were many small earthquakes this year. After minute of watching seismograph I realized that it’s moving quite fast. Those small earthquakes had to be couple of hours old, not couple of months as I supposed. I told it to my friends and I added that eruption is may be coming. They told me that I’m totally dumb. This happened on Saturday. On Sunday, we took airplane back to Honolulu. When I bought newspaper next day, I saw an article with title like this: “The biggest volcano eruption in past 10 years came yesterday”. I was really sad, because I didn’t see the eruption.
I could write about tens of other topics related to Hawaii. I have enough memories to write light book. I think I mentioned the most important facts about Hawaii that people wished to know. I would tell you just one more information about Hawaii. If you think that Hawaiians have never seen snow, your wrong. The tallest peak, Mauna Kea, which is Located on the Big Island, is famous because it’s only place in Hawaii, where can be found snow.