Neither of us are really "beach people". I like sitting on a beach and being warm and sunny, sure, but I couldn't deal with doing that, and only that, every day. I'd be bored in like, 5 minutes. Luckily, my boyfriend is the same way :) so, we got in as much activity as we could so that we could still see Hawaii, and work off some of the extreme food
- Attempted surfing. He was much more successful than I was, as I just fell over and got lots of salt water up my nose. But it turns out that surfing is a RIDICULOUS upper body workout, since the majority of the time, you're lying face down and paddling using your arms. My upper back and shoulders were still sore two days later! I also managed to get an epic sunburn from my hips to my heels down the back of my legs. Turns out that my sunscreen isn't nearly as waterproof as I was lead to believe :( I couldn't actually walk properly for the first two days. Still can't comfortably sit down/stand up or bend my knees.
- Scuba diving. Neither of us had ever tried it before, so hey, why not now?! I found a great company that didn't charge a crazy amount, included all of the equipment you needed, two 1/2 hour dives, and a small group (only 3 of us) lead by an awesome instructor. This was by far the best money that I spent in Hawaii. We saw huge schools of colourful fish, an enormous crab, and TURTLES!
- Bike riding. We decided to rent a couple of bikes (pretty cheap, only $20 for the whole day) and ride from Waikiki to Hanauma Bay, a popular beach destination and protected environmental reserve. When I Google mapped the route by bike, it claimed that it would take only about an hour and 15 minutes. The longest I have ever rode a bike in my life was about 50 minutes, so I figured I would be able to do it. Ummmm, yeah, turns out that it was actually TWO AND A HALF HOURS. Each way. And, on the way there, the steepest hill I have ever seen in my life. The wind was also INSANE on the way out, punching me in the face for the full two hours. By the time we got halfway, I was reeeeeeally struggling. Between the wind and the hill, I was actually in tears trying my damn hardest to push along. Had to stop a few times along the way and complained a lot to poor, poor boyfriend (who is a cyclist, and found this to be just a leisurely roll along the beach. Jerk). But - we made it! After lunch and a well-deserved ice cream, we rode back with the wind at our backs. We later learned that the ride was 27km each way, so a total of 54km round trip :)
- Hiking. We took a 2 mile trail up to see Manoa Falls, a beautiful little waterfall in the middle of a rainforest. My internet research suggested that the trail was slippery because of the humidity of a rainforest. What I didn't expect was the MUD. The entire trail was one giant mudslide. So, the 2 mile walk was actually an epic uphill muddy crawl, not unlike a Warrier Dash or other crazy obstacle course. It was quite pretty though, and well worth the messy shoes.
- Yoga. We found a place that does yoga every day on the beach (literally, in the sand), and a couple of times per week in the park. It was actually a pretty cool class, because the teacher caters to tourists by offering multilingual classes. In our class, we were the only two people who spoke English, everyone else was Japanese. So, the class was taught almost entirely in Japanese with random spurts of English for us (but we were able to follow along easily enough with the Japanese instruction). We also walked to and from the class, about a 5k walk total.
- Walking. Everywhere. Waikiki is a pain in the butt to drive in (like any downtown area, there are one-way streets and traffic everywhere), so it was just easier to walk most places. I'd guess that we walked about 5-8km every day at minimum.
How do you get in activity when you're on vacation?
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