Travel Blogger Daily Blog: Hiking To The Top Of Diamond Head In Hawaii

Views Of Waikiki Beach Worth The (Easy) Climb 

By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Travel Blogger

When Luau Larry – who lived in Honolulu for several years and once sold suntan lotion on Waikiki Beach, the lucky guy – suggested one day that we hike to the top of Diamond Head, I looked at him like he was crazy.

After all, it wasn’t like Luau Larry wanting to do something that did not involve having a Mai Tai.

Besides, I thought it was a crazy idea. Hike to the top of Diamond Head!? From the beach it seemed to be a grueling, sweat-inducing task, Hawaii’s equivalent of scaling Mt. Everest. Better to keep the toes on the sand and have, well, a Mai Tai.

But he insisted, saying it was not that tough of a climb, the views from the top are something I should take advantage of while I was in Honolulu and we would be back in plenty of time to have our late afternoon Mai Tais at the Royal Hawaiian.

So I wiped my brow, took a deep breath and agreed to do it.

And you know what – he was right; it turned out to be a remarkably easy climb.

I got my first hint of this when overweight tourists waddled out of tour buses that pulled into the parking lot. The sight of this infuriated Luau Larry. He didn’t mind the people being there, but tour buses delivering the tourists went against his “natural” Hawaii mentality. Better to arrive in rental cars, I suppose.

Anyway, I figured if Gladys from Iowa or whomever could climb Diamond Head then certainly The Kevbeaux could certainly make it without too much trouble.

Amazingly, most of the hike turned out to be more like a walk. Even a stroll. For the most part, we walked on a dirt path with a slight upgrade. Then we hit the steps. Just past a lookout spot, there were 74 of them.

This first set was fairly steep but not too bad. Then we hit the next set of stairs and here there were 99 of them. This was the only “let me stop and catch my breath” moment on the hike (hey, with these steps it turned from a walk into a hike). Those stair were steep, almost straight-up steep.

Eventually we reached a third set of stairs, but this was a spiral staircase so it was kind of like walking up inside a lighthouse. This put us in a bunker built for the war – not WWII as you might expect, but WWI.

After greeting a Diamond Head volunteer, we crawled, nearly on our hands and knees, out the opening of the bunker. And there, in front of us, was that view.

It stretched out as far as the eye could see over the Pacific Ocean and looked down at Waikiki Beach and the high-rises hotels from a vantage point equivalent to flying over it in a private plane.

Luau Larry was right – it was something I needed to take advantage of while I was in Honolulu. I’m not only glad I did it, but I’ve done it on just about every other trip I’ve taken to Honolulu.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for all travelers – listen to people who know a lot about a destination.

Cheers!