10 Things to Do in Las Vegas

Hawaii is a long way, so stopped en route for a few days in Vegas. Here are a few things I got up to while I was there.

1. Helicopter flight to the Grand Canyon 

Apart from the fact that our pilot clearly seemed incredibly bored by the whole thing (I suppose even if your day job is flying a helicopter into the Grand Canyon, it becomes a mindless chore you grow to hate) this was pretty cool. Champagne lunch turned out to be cheap sparkling wine and some muffins, but still, what a view. We also flew over the Hoover Dam.

2. Top of the fake Eiffel Tower in fake Paris

Eiffel should sue.

Much nicer than the real Paris.

3. Gondola ride along the fake Grand Canal in fake Venice

At the Venetian hotel. Our gondolier sang a couple of songs I didn't recognise (he didn't do requests), but he sounded utterly bored too. 

Much nicer than the real Venice. That sky is fake.

4. Rollercoaster at New York, New York

Much nicer than the real New York. And more blurry.

5. Rides on the top of the Stratosphere

6. Buffet at Caesar's Palace

aka "Fight off rivals in the queue while grabbing as many crab legs as you can for $50 ." But Holy Fuck. The desserts!

That's not a cube of spam by the way.

7. Aquarium at Mandalay Bay

Not the best aquarium I've ever been to.

8. Fountains at the Bellagio

Luckily you can't hear "My Heart Will Go On" which was the tune for this particular display.

9. Cocktails at the Wynn

What kind of monstrous egoist asshole writes his name across the top of his hotels? Oh yes, Donald Trump. (And Steve Wynn)

10. Zumanity Cirque du Soleil show

This is the "funny" burlesque cirque du soleil show - with tits. It was excruciatingly awful.  Spent the entire time squirming in my seat hoping not to make eye contact with any of the performers so they wouldn't drag me on stage and pretend to perform some kind of sex act on me while stripping me to my boxers.

Top 10 Things To Do In Hawaii

I had a marvellous time in Hawaii. It's a wonderful place. You should all go. NOW. Here's my list of the top 10 experiences of my holiday.

All pics taken by me with my Panasonic Lumix.

1. Watching the sun set at the summit of Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea is a 14,000 feet volcano forming the middle of Hawai'i ("the big island"). It's also, when measured from the floor of the Pacific Ocean, the highest mountain in the world. Home to 13 telescopes - including the Keck telescopes with better resolution than Hubble thanks to adaptive optics - and above the cloud line, it's one of the best places in the world to observe the stars. It was also absolutely bloody freezing at the top. And with a lack of oxygen I felt extremely light-headed. Don't try to drive yourself to the top btw. It's a long, very steep road, and your hire car will probably die; we went on a brilliant tour with Hawaii Forest and Trail, which culminated with about an hour of looking at the night sky through a pretty hefty telescope, while Nate our guide talked us through all the visible constellations using a laser pointer. Oh, and we had hot chocolate and muffins. The trip up Mauna Kea was spectacular and definitely the highlight of the holiday for me.

2. Snorkelling at Molikini crater

Molikini is a crescent-shaped, partially submerged volcanic crater off the coast of Maui. It's supposedly the best snorkelling in Hawaii, and it was pretty awesome, like floating in the world's largest and best-stocked tropical aquarium.  Amazing visibility and millions of colourful fish. We also snorkelled on the back wall of the crater, which is similar but more err vertical. 

The state fish of Hawaii is the humuhumunukunukuapua'a. I saw loads. 

3. Snorkelling with turtles at Turtle Town on Maui

Wow. Snorkelling with Hawaiian green turtles ("honu" in Hawaiian) is incredible. They're really very friendly and swim gently towards you, grinning - or what looks like a grin, anyway. We saw loads of sea turtles on several of the islands in Hawaii. You can't really miss them. (Oh, and there isn't really such a place as 'Turtle Town', even though it sounds like a cutesy Pixar spin-off from Finding Nemo - maybe John Goodman could be the grouchy turtle mayor with a big heart; err anyway, it refers to a few beaches where  you can see TOITLES.)

A TOITLE. Obviously, this one is just napping or squirting eggs or something, and not swimming,
But I didn't have a GoPro when snorkelling.

4. Whale watching 

On the way back from snorkelling Molokini and with the turtles, we encountered a group of five or six whales, who were breaching and spouting and doing whale stuff. First time I've seen whales in the wild. That was one hell of a good trip. (Didn't have my camera on this trip, cos the boat was a RIB and pretty wet. But you know what whales look like. Big, grey, underwater buses with tails.)

5. Diving 100ft to a shipwreck in a submarine

Yes, a real submarine. It's kind of expensive but fun. We saw a shark.

The Atlantis. It plays the Mission Impossible theme when diving. 

Mmmmm... murky. This was the Carthaginian, a replica of a 19th century supply vessel, sunk deliberately to create a reef.

6. Driving the road to Hāna

Crazy, crazy road. Approximately 620 bends and 46 one-lane-wide bridges over gorges along Route 360 from Kahului to Hāna on Maui, through lush, tropical rainforest and past dozens of waterfalls. Average speed is only about 15mph so takes a couple of hours to drive less than 50 miles. There's really nothing whatsoever in Hana. So we just turned around and drove back.

7. Seeing the Halemaʻumaʻu crater of Kīlauea volcano at night

Kīlauea is a currently "hyperactive" shield volcano on Big Island and the most active of Hawaii's five volcanoes. During the day it looks like a massive crater spewing a bit of smoke, but after dark it's pretty fiery and spectacular. We also walked through the Thurston lava tube and drove the Chain of Craters road down to a sea arch on the coast through a remarkable lava landscape. Counter-intuitively, the Volcano National Park is often quite wet - it's on the rainy interior part of the island. (The interior of most islands is rainy, the edges sunny.)

Halemaʻumaʻu crater by day - "smokin'"

Crater by night - You have angered Pele, the Hawaiian god of fire.

End of the road. Volcanic hazard. 

8. Pearl Harbor

Despite the ridiculous traffic getting there and back from Waikiki, Pearl Harbor is a fascinating and moving experience. You have to arrive early in the day for tickets for the USS Arizona memorial (a sunken ship) - which I didn't -  but there's tons of other stuff to do. I spent my time on the impressive USS Missouri battleship ("Big Mo") on whose desk the peace treaty was signed with the Japanese in Tokyo Bay which ended the war in the Pacific in 1945.

Nice guns. That's the USS Arizona memorial in the water.

9. Watching the night time manta ray snorkelling at the Sheraton, Kona

The Sheraton at Kona is a rather swanky resort (translation = much too sophisticated for me), and in the evening, from their excellent restaurant 'Rays on the Bay', you can watch people snorkel with giant mantas from dozens of boats. The boats have powerful lights which attract plankton, which in turn attracts plenty of mantas to feed. I didn't actually do the snorkelling, but my friend did and said it was incredible and the highlight of her holiday. But the bar does an excellent and really strong Mai Tai, so it was still a fabulous place to hang out... as far as I can remember.

Sunset at Kona. The boat in this picture was the actual boat the snorkellers went snorkelling from.

View from Rays on the Bay. 

10. Greenwells Farm coffee plantation on Big Island

There's coffee everywhere on Hawaii. Coffee and pineapples and macadamia nuts and beer. You can visit quite a few coffee plantations, but Greenwells was really enjoyable. A free tour round the farm, and loads of samples of their rather excellent coffee. We also visited the Dole plantation on Oahu, which grows pineapples, but that wasn't as much fun. 

A coffee bush yesterday. 

Some more pictures

Hawaii was beautiful. Here are some more pics from the trip, including a few places that didn't make the cut for the top 10.

Waikiki beach, Oahu. Waikiki was originally swampland. Supposedly the sand for the beach was shipped in from Australia.

Beach somewhere on Maui.

Waimea Canyon, Kauai. Didn't quite make my top 10 but was still pretty spectacular.

Beach on Big Island. Was at the end of a very dodgy lava dirt road. Thought I'd broke the hire car at one point.

Observatories on Mauna Kea. Another pic. Because it was so beautiful up there.

Akaka Falls, Big Island. Again, didn't make the top 10 but an aesthetically pleasing watefall nevertheless.

LaHaina, Maui.  An old whaling town. (I think they've stopped whaling now, though.)

Things I didn't do but will do next time

I'm definitely going back to Hawaii. It's fab and there's tons to do. Here's what we didn't get round to:

1. Surfing/bodyboarding.  So many amazing beaches all over each island, with superb  dangerously chunky waves.
2. Ziplining. There are loads of huge ziplines across all the islands. Looks fun.
3. Helicopter trip on Kauai to see the Nā Pali coast. The only way to get there. No roads. 
4. Boat trip to see lava meeting the ocean on Big Island. We didn't have time to get there from where we were in the Volcano National Park. Big Island is a err... big island.
5. Hiking. We did lots of driving, not much walking though. A lot of the cool places are only accessible on foot. Apparently.
6. Luau. Big feasts with music and hula dancing. Never went to one.