Hawai‘i: the world’s biggest waves, Hula, and Housing issues

Chapter 31 of A Kiwi on the Amtrak Tracks

FROM MIAMI, I flew to Kona International Airport in Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i was meant to be the icing on the cake, my final stop in the USA before heading on home to New Zealand. I had been away for months now and was looking forward to getting back to some normality.

Well, I’ll tell you, my introduction to Hawai‘i was not the tropical relaxing time that I had envisioned and been looking forward to. I was still in the throes of severe food poisoning picked up in Baracoa, Cuba, a country I visited for three weeks after my stay in Miami: a city to which I then briefly returned in order to catch the plane to Hawai‘i. (I write about Cuba in my book A Maverick Cuban Way.)

In honour of the fallen astronaut Ellison Onizuka, who grew up locally, Kona International Airport has been officially known since 2017 as Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole.

Kona International Airport is close to a town called Kailua-Kona on the largest island of the Hawai‘ian archipelago: an island that is also known as Hawai‘i but more usually just called the Big Island.

From Kona, I caught a local flight to the smaller but more densely populated island of Oahu, more correctly spelt O‘ahu, about…