Overall thoughts on the Big Island
The Big Island is the youngest and largest island of Hawaii with active volcanoes still creating new land. We recently spent 10 days on the Big Island, covering both Kona and Hilo. We know a lot of friends going to, or wanting to visit the Big Island, so this blog post series is for you!
We chose to go to the Big Island based on raving reviews from a few friends who has gone back multiple times. I’m also not a fan of places that can get too touristy (like Honolulu) so we opted for the Big Island. The Big Island also hosts 8 (some say 11) of the world’s 15 climatic zones so we figured there’s lots to see and experience.
We flew out on a Friday morning and had 1 connecting flight in Denver, arriving in Hawaii at 2:30pm. After picking up our Mustang Convertible (a tourist identified along with Jeeps), we decided to head over to Costco to pick up some food before starting our trip to Hilo.
I highly recommend studying Hawaii Revealed guidebook (some call it the Blue Bible of Hawaii), this is how I planned 99% of our trip. Click here for a more detailed, colour coded map.
Things to Note
There’s so much to talk about that I thought it was best to break it up in a few parts. A more detailed itinerary is below broken out by the east and west side of the island. But here, I wanted to share some overall thoughts and key highlights of our trip:
- A lot of people recommend you to drive a 4WD (Jeep) on the Big Island, it’s a bit more expensive, it may be worth it for some but not really required.
- You can take out a shelter dog from the Big Island Humane Society – what better way to see the outdoors than with a good boy!
- I think people exaggerate about how expensive things can get on the island (I almost packed canned food lol). But they have superstores like Costco, Walmart and Target (I might’ve been most excited about going to Target while in Hawaii) with pretty average and affordable prices.
- Everything on the island starts closing between 5pm-7pm.
- Cafe 100’s Loco Moco was bland and did not live up to the hype.
- Sheraton’s Luau also did not live up to the hype.
- Try to find your excursions from Groupon! That’s where we found our Manta Ray Snorkeling and Captain Zodiac tours.
- Unfortunately with the recent eruptions, the Volcano National Park closed down a lot of their good trails.
- A lot of their waterfalls are just a walk away and no hiking for others (good for some, not for others who like to be more active).
Overall, we enjoyed our time but Hawaii was not what we expected. There weren’t as many hiking trails as we thought and the beaches were much smaller. We never felt that ‘ah-ha’ moment but we did have a great time on our excursions and got a chance to relax and enjoy each other’s company.
Life Outside the Inbox 