Hawaii

Home to two of the most active volcanoes in the world, one would expect Hawaii’s southernmost island to be an angry land of deadened rock and rivers of red. But this ever-expanding island has a myriad of moods—the gentle rolling hills of Waimea; the inviting sand of the Kohala Coast;

Early Sunday morning and the only traffic on the 11-mile Crater Rim Trail was our little core of a dozen bikers. We rounded another bend and caught our first eye-widening view of Halema’uma’u Crater. Once home to a lake of lava in the 1920s, steam was now gushing forth over

By John Grossmann At some point during your stay at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, even you, who foolishly keep lifting the lid of a laptop or finger massaging an iPad, will sidle up and awkwardly  ease your way into a clichéd but still wondrous resort amenity:  a beige hammock

Another Side of Maui: Farm to Table (to Beach)

By Tom Passavant “It’s whale soup out there,” says the captain. It isn’t exactly “thar she blows!”, but it still neatly sums up what we’re about to encounter on a blazing blue-sky morning last week. It’s 8 a.m. and Trilogy Elua, a 50-foot catamaran, is about to head out of

By Tom Passavant In the 1960s, when I was in high school, my father had a tiki bar in the basement of our suburban Ohio home. It had a thatched roof, bamboo sides, and bottles of rum with colorful labels. Little did I know that the parties he and my

  By Tom Passavant Here’s a radical proposal for spending some quality time in Honolulu: head indoors. After all, it does occasionally rain in the islands (mostly in winter), and when it does, there are some very worthwhile alternatives to sitting in your hotel room watching reruns of Blue Hawaii.

By Tom Passavant A few weeks ago, Epicurious, the enormously popular food Web site, predicted that Korean cuisine would be one of the top ten food trends for 2011. “Evidence is mounting that smoky, piquant Korean is America’s next big cuisine,” wrote Epicurious editor in chief Tanya Steel. Well, if

By Tom Passavant Glimpses of authentic Hawaiian culture have a way of popping up in the most unlikely places here in the islands, none more so than smack in the heart of Tourist Central, aka Waikiki. For example, just a stone’s throw from a vast Cheesecake Factory on bustling Kalakaua