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Honolulu might be one of the most famous tourist destinations in the world, but the thing people fail to mention is that the city itself borders on catastrophic.

For one thing, the traffic is the worst I’ve ever seen.

Mendy and I went to Los Angeles a few years ago, and before we went people would occasionally pull us aside. “Look,” they’d say quietly, in a tone that suggested they were fearful for our lives, “Are you sure you want to drive there? You know that LA traffic is the worst in the world.”

We went, we hired a car, and things were fine. The highways moved nicely, even at rush hour, and we weren’t  menaced, car-jacked, or otherwise troubled. Indeed, Los Angeles traffic was far, far easier to negotiate than London traffic. I worked as a wine-delivery man in London during my college years, and London traffic makes almost all other traffic world-wide (with the possible exception of Marrakesh) look pedestrian by comparison.

That’s what I used to think until we reached Honolulu.

Hawaii’s big problem is that its population has more than doubled since the sixties. And, since then, tourism has exploded: it’s guessed that, at any particular time, tourists make up twenty per cent of Hawaii’s residents.

But, despite the huge increase in population, Hawaii hasn’t grown more accommodating in terms of roads. It’s impossible to widen a three-lane highway when one side is bordered by residential apartments and the other by the Pacific Ocean. That means that rush-hour traffic is more or less stationary, and lasts from seven in the morning until a little after eleven, when the last Hawaiians heave themselves, sweating, into their offices.

Even once you reach downtown Honolulu, four miles and three hours after you left your house, things don’t improve much. Downtown Honolulu is a tourist paradise of Ralph Lauren shops and stalls selling a tremendous variety of Hawaiian-themed crap.

“I went to Hawaii and got lei’d!” read one sticker.

“Ha!” I thought. “It’s funny because they’ve used ‘lei’d’ as a double entendre! The wags!”

I don’t react well to tourist paradises, and Waikiki Beach, which is Honolulu’s tourist central, was no different. All people are offered there is the same chance to buy things they’d buy at home, just near a beach.

But what you shouldn’t do is visit Honolulu and write off the rest of Hawaii. What you should do, actually, is look up my sister and get her to show you around, because she’s a great guide. We dispensed with Honolulu in a morning, and spent the rest of our time in Hawaii pottering about Oahu.

When the clouds roll in across Oahu’s dark-green hills, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see a stegosaurus thunder across the road. That could well be because Jurassic Park was filmed there, but even so it’s hard to think of a more perfect setting. We spent an arm-wearying few hours kayaking among mangrove trees, pausing occasionally to nudge my sister’s smaller craft into the leaves. Sibling bullying never gets old.

We also spent a day on Hawaii’s North Shore. The North Shore is nearly a perfect tourism experience: it’s far enough away from Honolulu that Ralph Lauren and his crap-hawking buddies haven’t reached it, but only an hours’ drive. And, enough tourists go there that it’s possible to get decent food and find parking, but not enough that there’s a McDonald’s. When we went there it was busy but relaxed, and we found a place on the main street that sold three dollar cups of chilli and rice.

Better yet, if you go to the North Shore and take a forty five minute walk you’ll arrive at the beach set of Lost.

For the uninitiated, of whom there can’t be many left, Lost is one of the finest in a fairly long stream of excellent American TV programs. It’s hard to say why: there’s mystery, suspense, and an almost bewildering assortment of interlinked storylines, some of which nearly die out from season to season, only to become crucial later. The whole thing stems from a plane crash somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, and the wreckage of the plane and the survivor’s makeshift campsite, forms the principal setting of the entire series.

The entire set is there: bits of broken aircraft and tents made from parachutes sit in a shaded enclave against the noise of the waves. As someone who’s watched the entire thing so far, being that close to where key moments had happened was really quite something, not least because the Lost set is impossible to reach by road. It’s three quarters of an hour from the car park, which means the solitary security guard there doesn’t see much action. Better yet, he didn’t care about photography and videoing.

This was our last day in Hawaii before we headed to the mainland to get set up for our Central American leg: on the way back we saw sea turtles. We’d snorkelled with them on the Big Island, but these were on the beach, apparently waiting for the tide to collect them and drag them back out into the ocean. Sea turtles are enormous: easily four feet long and half that again at their widest. They’re also rare: every species of sea turtle in the world is listed as either threatened or endangered, which makes seeing two in one place (or more, as we’d done a few days earlier) even better.

I’m still gutted I didn’t buy an “I got lei’d” sticker, though.

Dave didn’t kidnap a turtle either. Not enough room.

Links

Wikipedia page on sea turtles:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_turtle
Hawaiian Flickr set, now with more sea turtles.