Hawaii's Travel and Photo Guide

The fresh, floral air energizes you. The warm, tranquil waters refresh you. The breathtaking, natural beauty renews you.

Hawai'i - aka the Big Island - is nearly twice the size of all the other Hawaiian islands combined. Geographically it's the most diverse island of the archipelago, with deserts, rainforests, volcanoes and, surprisingly, snow-capped mountains.

The mountains create a barrier that blocks the northeasterly trade winds, making the western side of the island the driest region in the archipelago. This coast has the best beaches and water conditions. The eastern coast is rugged, with pounding surf, tropical rainforests and majestic waterfalls.

Kauai's Na Pali

Sun Set

Iolani Palace in Honolulu

Black sand beach

Traditional outtrigger canoes

Noidea Beach

Area
28,311 square kilometers
(10,931 square miles)

Population
1,257,608

Capital
Honolulu; 378,155

Per Capita Income
U.S. $30,040

The North-East coast of the island is its most rugged, with several sections not easily accessible by road. The East end is the part which receives the most precipitation on the island, several hundreds of inches of rain, which sustains a lush tropical vegetation, and many orchid farms. Precipitation has also limited development, and Hilo ("America's rainiest city") has remained the last Hawaiian city unaffected by tourism.

More than six million vacationers, most of them from the continental U.S. or Japan, spend close to 11 billion dollars a year in this tropical archipelago. Defense, centered on U.S. military bases at Pearl Harbor, is the second largest moneymaker. Descendants of Asians, who immigrated in the 19th and early 20th century to work on sugar plantations, add to the mix of people in this only state with no ethnic majority: Caucasians constitute 24 percent; Japanese, 18 percent; Filipino, 12 percent. The remainder includes ethnic Chinese and those of Hawaiian ancestry. Ecologists estimate that 89 percent of Hawaii's flowering plants and 97 percent of its land animals—among them the world's only predatory caterpillars—exist nowhere else on Earth. ECONOMY

Industry: tourism, trade, finance, food processing, petroleum refining, stone, clay, and glass products.
Agriculture: sugarcane, pineapples, nursery stock, tropical fruit, livestock, macadamia nuts.

Text source: National Geographic Atlas of the World, Eighth Edition, 2004