[This is What Hawaii is Like in 2023 🌸 Honolulu is NOT what we thought | dulichbonphuong

This video is brought to you by Aura Health. Last time on Delightful Travelers, we said goodbye to the beautiful country of Japan. We so enjoyed our time there and we already can't wait to go back. In this video, we arrive in Hawaii for the very first time. We're on the island of Oahu and we're so excited to see what this place is about. I'm Anna and this is Trevor. In this mini-series, we're checking a bucket list item off of our travel list. Visiting Hawaii. Make sure to hit subscribe and click the like button so you don't miss a single video. A huge thanks to our channel members and patrons for making these videos possible. Welcome to Hawaii. Do you guys know how long we have waited to come to Hawaii? I wanted to come here ever since I was a kid. Me too. I think it's pretty common as a Canadian kid growing up to dream of Hawaii. We are on the island of Oahu and in the city of Honolulu. This neighborhood that we are in right now is called Waikiki. You've probably heard of it before. We are on Waikiki Beach. Isn't that completely stunning? It's actually just in Japan and it's really nice to be back in hot weather. This is one of the most famous beaches in the entire world, especially in the USA. I'm a little bit shocked, we both are, at how very little people are here. I thought that this beach would be packed, to be honest. In the last little while, we spent time in Europe in the summertime where the beaches are unbelievably packed. Then we were in Asia, we found lots of empty and busy beaches there. From just looking, you might think that looks really busy, but when you look closely, there's lots and lots of space. This is probably one of the busier times of the year here. We've been trying to figure out what this place reminds us of. We've only been here for less than 24 hours, but it does remind us of two different places mashed together. One being New San Juan in Puerto Rico. The buildings and the architecture look like that place a little bit. Also, Miami and South Beach, but except there, take away all of the craziness that happens on Ocean Drive, and you get a more laid-back, chill island lifestyle here. We're really digging this. In a way, that's really hard to explain. This place just has really good vibes. Like Trevor said, it's really laid-back and it just feels good. I think it's one of those things you have to come and experience for yourself to totally know what I mean, but I want to point out one thing. I'm really liking this beach. I haven't actually had any time to actually spend here, but on this side, it's like maybe you can go have fun. The kids can splash around in the waves, but then if you want more lagoon style, over here they have it sectioned off the seawall, and it's all calm over here. This is probably where we would be if we had some time to spend at the beach. This is definitely where I would be. I think you guys can tell we are absolutely stoked to be here in Hawaii. If you're excited and if you're new or not new, make sure to hit the thumbs-up button because that will help get the video out there. I'm going to get off the beach now and see what else is down this way. For those of you that follow us week to week, you're probably now wondering what are your plans. You're in the United States, even though we're in Hawaii right now, not even close to mainland USA. We do have plans to go there. This is a great stopover if you are coming between Asia. We just spent five months in Asia. We were just in Japan. Maybe it's just a stopover here on our way to mainland USA. Hopefully, catch up on the jet lag. That's why we did it, right? We're hoping that it will help with the jet lag, but we'll see. We're going to spend a few days here. Not nearly enough time, but it is quite expensive. Traveling full-time, you can't spend a long time in really expensive places. We're here for a few days. Then we're flying to, I guess you could say, the southwestern US, meeting up with some friends. We have some big plans there. We're meeting up with some friends that you guys may have seen in a video before. We're going to be doing some things that we've never done in our lives. Get ready for those videos coming up. It's going to be so much fun. I cannot wait. Right now, we'll just keep experiencing Honolulu. Something that we noticed literally when we got off the plane was just how distinctly unique this place is, especially compared to the rest of the US. Not that the US isn't overly unique or anything like that, but there's something that feels really different, really culturally different here. They do have this Polynesian background, a lot of Polynesian culture, and you feel it right away. It's really, really interesting. All that does have us wondering, and we have a question for all of you Americans watching. Do you think of Hawaii as your American tropical island? I'm sure you do. Or do some of you think of it as another country entirely? I realize it's not another country, but because it has its own culture, its own language, it's very unique, we're just curious what the Americans think. Canadians just think of it as America, but being here, this feels different than mainland USA. Well, take a look at this incredible tree that we've just come across. It's beautiful. Is that a banyan tree? It's a banyan tree? Yeah. All banyan trees look like this. Sometimes they grow certain, maybe certain places, it gets even bigger and thicker. Oh, cool. Bigger and thicker. Are you from here? Yeah. Oh, thank you very much. I know how banyan trees all look like. This one is still young yet. This one might still be young. Yeah. Thank you for letting us know. We keep saying this, but Hawaiians are like some of the nicest people we've ever met. Some of the things we wanted to talk about today was actually talk about how nice Hawaiians and people from, like Americans in general, sometimes get a bad rep around the world. You get here and everybody is so nice. You go into a store and people are asking you where you're from, if you're having a great time, what you're doing today. Everybody's so nice and talkative and they just stop and answer questions that you randomly ask to the camera. Before we get any further in this week's video, we just wanted to say a huge thanks to Aura Health for being a sponsor. Now, some of you know that I've dealt with debilitating anxiety in the past and I wish I'd known about the Aura app. Aura Health is the all-in-one app for your well-being and sleep. It has thousands of meditations, stories, and so much more like CBT, meditation, and coaching. Aura's content is created by hundreds of expert coaches and therapists all around the world. When trying to get out of bed in the morning seems overwhelming, then trying to find resources to help seems impossible. When I was struggling with my anxiety, I relied on tools like cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. I'm happy to say both of these are available in the Aura app and you can access these in seconds. I love that Aura has so many options, even for a busy schedule, so each day you can just set aside a few minutes to devote to it. For instance, you can do a morning meditation that's just four minutes long. Or if you're feeling overwhelmed during the day, it's so easy to head to a quiet place and turn on soothing sounds like soft rain or ocean waves. Something that I think a lot of people struggle with is getting a good night's sleep and Aura has so many options to help you sleep better from meditations to sounds to stories. This app is honestly a huge game changer. It's not a one-size-fits-all like other apps. There's so much more variety and personalization and at the same time, it has so many resources that you can use every single day along your wellness journey. A huge thanks to Aura Health for supporting us on our journey of well-being and sleep. Get started with Aura for free at AuraHealth.io slash DelightfulTravelers or click the link in the description below. Alright, now back to Hawaii. So as we make our way along this like beach walkway, we're also walking on one of the main roads here in Waikiki. And if you didn't know, it's basically like the main tourist area here in Honolulu. There is lots of hotels, lots of restaurants, loads and loads and loads of shopping. There's coffee shops as well. So we have come over to a coffee shop called Honolulu Coffee and we hear the coffee in Hawaii is incredible. It's actually considered some of the best in the world. We have an Americano today. It's an iced Americano. And notice it's black. We don't want to poison this, let's say, with milk or cream or sugar today. We really want to just try it as it is with a little bit of ice to make it nice and cold. Alright, let's actually try it. Ooh, that's really, really good. Really smooth. It's not too bitter or too sweet. It's kind of like a perfectly balanced coffee. Sometimes I find like high quality coffees are often a little bit too bitter but this one definitely is not. So it's called Kona Coffee. That's where it's grown in Hawaii, Kona. Apparently it's very, very well known. It's considered one of the top coffees in the world. So if you're a coffee fan, Hawaii is a place you should definitely come to. And you're going to find places all over, at least here in Waikiki, I'm sure all over probably all the islands in Hawaii, you're going to find various coffee shops that have locally grown coffee. We have now come over to Diamond Head State Monument Park and believe it or not, right now we are standing inside a volcano crater. So this is one of the top things to do here in Oahu. Apparently we're going to hike up for a while. I think it maybe takes about 45 minutes. We will see. And then we're going to have some really fabulous views. Hope you guys feel like going hiking. So just a couple of logistical things. One is that you can't just show up here and expect to go for a hike. You have to go online first to the state park's website, book your day and your time, and then you come basically within like an hour increments. I think we're actually going. There's no way you'll see this with this camera, but maybe I can zoom in a little bit. There are some stairs like way, way up there. We're already getting some amazing views here. And right now the pavement that we were on, or the concrete, has turned into like rocks. Yeah, interesting. It's almost like it was once paved and then it kind of like turned down again. Yeah, I think by the top, we read on the sign back there that I think all the concrete and rocks go away. Maybe it'll be slightly more difficult, but probably about 30% of the way. A little out of breath so far. I'm not going to lie. We're starting to get some amazing views and I'm sure it's only going to get better as we keep going up and up. But you might be wondering, why is this place called Diamond Head? Because I certainly wondered that myself. It seems like an odd name for like a crater or a mountain. Basically, British soldiers arrived here in the 19th century and they were in this area and looked down at the beach, which was covered in crystals, and they thought it was diamonds. So this area was part of a series of volcanoes that erupted under the ocean 2.6 million years ago. And the crater here happened because 300,000 years ago it erupted and made this glorious hole in the earth. And now it is quite a spectacle to be up here. I also have to say, the further we get, the easier I'm finding it. I'm still huffing and puffing, but now I just know the end's in sight. We've got to get to the top. So I did a lot of reading on this volcanic area and there's a lot of facts, so I could have them slightly messed up, but hopefully not. One was that this crater was actually formed on one eruption. But something I read about it was that it's a type of volcano that will probably only erupt once in its lifetime, so it already did that. I think we should be pretty safe. Yeah, just in case our mothers are watching and being like, why are you walking up a volcano? Well, we found another look-off point. This one looks more official. Yeah, I think we're almost to the top. It must be up there somewhere, but still another good view. Yeah, you excited? Well, look at this view. It's insane. We started back this way as well, so you can kind of see where we're at so far. What do you think, 30 minutes in? I'd say something like that. Yeah, that is my guess. We're just walking up some stairs, even more out of breath. Didn't expect these, did we? Must not expect that. Hopefully this is the end of it. It was a big tunnel here. Looks like we're going into complete darkness. Well, you guys, this is unexpected. Now that we're in this little cavern, I'm not even trying to whisper. I'm just out of breath. There's no wind, so yeah, I'm going to start sweating. But there's also no light, but I swear, we're in here. Just a word of warning, because I didn't read anything about this before we came. If you have claustrophobia, maybe don't do this. We can certainly say being up here is definitely worth the 45-minute climb. Honestly, it was pretty easy. Towards the end, the stairs did drain us out a little bit, but these panoramic views you get here of the city, and just like all the rolling mountains in the background, you can see all these people's homes. It's pretty freaking epic. I didn't think it would be this nice up here, honestly. So if you guys are thinking about coming here, do it. Don't know how well you're going to be able to see using this lens, but we actually started the video right down there, and then made our way up here. I love this view. You can see the whole city. I know. I didn't even really mention the color of the water down here. It's just wild to me that people have homes right on the edge of this creek. Which one's ours? I don't know. A future one. Somewhere is down there. Or maybe one of those condos on the beach. Sure, I can live with that. Being up here really makes you appreciate the true beauty of Hawaii. This crater is massive, and from the air, it is straight up astounding. This is one of those views that we admired as kids, and we always look forward to coming to Hawaii one day to see this. Well, we've had a few minutes to enjoy the view, cool off a little bit. Now we have to get back down, and whenever we do stuff like this, I always think going down is going to be easier, and it always ends up being harder, and it always kills my legs, but what do you do? There's no other way to get down, and I think I see maybe an ice cold beer in my future. We've come over to a brewery called Waikiki Brewing, and we heard a lot about this place. I think it's safe to say we have earned our drink today after doing that climb. This is a blonde ale, and luckily for us, there is happy hour all day. It's like $5.50 a beer, or something like that. That's incredible. Let's try it out. Oh, yeah. It's not our first craft beer we had here. We had one yesterday, but so far, we're learning quickly. Hawaii knows how to do craft beer. If you guys don't know, we drink craft beer all the time, but the neighborhood we're in here is called Kakaako. Kakaako? It's kind of a fun name to say. I think it's Kakaako, but it's kind of this industrial park area that's transforming. You can see little pieces of graffiti around, so it'll be fun to maybe see more of that as we go on throughout the day. I just noticed the menu says Historic Brewing District. This area actually came highly recommended from some locals. I don't think we ever would have known about this by ourselves, but it's nice to ask people that live here and get recommendations, and a lot of people said this area is really well-known for its craft beer. Apparently, there's a whole bunch of breweries and taprooms within a few blocks of each other. Lots of street art, as Trevor already said. I think it's a very local area. Not many tourists know about it, which is always fun as well, and we love finding craft beer. Can I just say how nice it is to be back in the U.S. Yes, we've had lots of craft beer in the past few months. We were in Asia, but the U.S. definitely knows how to do a good craft beer. Speaking of the U.S. and craft beer, we were just chatting, and the last time we were in this country was over three years ago, well over three years ago. As a Canadian, that's pretty crazy. It's been a long time. We even hooked up our last video that we filmed in the United States, and it was back in Miami something like five years ago. That's absolutely crazy for us. I hope you guys are excited that we are back. We're super stoked, and we're not just going to be in Hawaii. We've got some other areas that we're going to go to. I think our biggest audience is also people like U.S. citizens or U.S. people that watch us, so hopefully all you Americans are very excited that we're here, and we'd love to get your recommendations like where should we go in the United States. It's so big. Yes, please do let us know because basically, as we already said, we are heading to sort of the southwest of the U.S. That's kind of already planned out, a little bit set in stone already. However, after that, we go home for maybe a month, visit some family. I don't even know if we're going to film because we have so much of a backlog right now from being in Japan, being in Korea, and then all the stuff that we're about to do, we're going to have a lot of videos. However, after that, we're thinking about coming back to the U.S. maybe again, and really like the opportunity is totally open. Maybe go to a city that we don't really know much about. We could rent an apartment for like a month or so. We're really trying to get into this like living in a place for a while. I'd love to find some random American city that maybe isn't even on our radar that you guys recommend to us. It is now the next day and we're back at our apartment that we rented. We know you guys like when we show you our accommodations, so we thought we would do that today. Anna's just back here getting some water, and we're going to give you an official tour because this is a really nice place we're staying in except, well, everything's a little bit expensive here. Actually, this is not the apartment we originally rented. We had originally booked a small little studio apartment. It was teeny tiny. When we checked in, they told us that the pool was under renovation which was kind of a bummer because we kind of rented it, you know, just to have access to a pool although we don't have that much time to use it. And then everything was good. It was the weekend, and then on Monday morning they started drilling and jackhammering like early in the morning. It was so loud. We couldn't even think. We couldn't work. We had a bunch of work to get done, so I sent a message to our host, and he was super fast and actually moved us immediately over to this apartment. Yeah, it worked out really well. So this place is big. Anna's obviously in the kitchen, but we have a desk here, big fridge. Here's the entryway. That's a huge kitchen here. I love all the windows in here. Of course, we have a living room area over here, a couple of different couches, and there is a TV, of course. Yeah, we'll show you the patio in just a minute, but if we turn this way, here is the bedroom which is kind of, it's kind of a one bedroom. These pull out to make like a... It does actually close off, so it is technically a one bedroom even though it feels like a really big studio when you first walk in, but there are doors. So you have this huge room over here. I feel like they thought it out really well. There is a desk over there, although we're using the table as that right now. Bed, very comfy bed, and then over there, they actually have a set, like a bunch of drawers, but it's perfect. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but it's perfect to put your suitcases on top, and I feel like no one ever thinks of that. Yeah, they did a good job with the mirrors here too. It just reflects all the light. Then we have a bathroom this way which certainly does the trick. Yeah, nice and spacious in here. I'll take you guys outside to our patio. So it's a great little great space. You can see we have a table, two chairs. There is an air conditioning unit out here as well. That's pretty common. You need air conditioning, but yeah, we have a pretty nice view. We're 20 floors up, so it's pretty windy. I don't know if you can hear it now, but we have a great view of the city itself here in Honolulu, and we actually have a view of where we were earlier. So that's the big kind of volcanic, what's called a hill or a mountain back there, and we even have a little bit of a glimpse of the ocean which is kind of neat. So we're really digging the space here. There actually is a really nice pool here. I don't think we'll have time to take advantage of it. Maybe I'll try to get out there for a couple hours today, but I highly doubt it's going to happen. There's so much work to get done. You guys are probably already wondering about price because I know here in Oahu and Hawaii in general, things are really generally really expensive. So we were here over a long weekend, so I think it was a bit more expensive, and we booked the studio for, I think it was about $150 a night, so definitely not cheap. It's one of the most expensive places we've stayed in in a while, Japan. That's US dollars. Yeah, USD. And this place I think starts, so we didn't actually have to pay a different price for this, but I think this one starts around $150 a night, so it probably gets more expensive in like super high season and also long weekends and stuff like that. That's of course not the only thing that's expensive around here. I mean, in general, Hawaii can be pricey when it comes to food, entertainment. I mean, all of the United States is really, but I think here might be a little more. You guys can let us know. Yeah, we're also in Waikiki, which I'm sure is more expensive than some other areas in Honolulu as well. Yeah, we have managed to find some happy hour places if we're looking for craft beer or something like that. We're looking for the deals, but in general, just remember, we came from Southeast Asia. We did spend some time in Japan as well, which is also pricey, but for the last five months we've been in Southeast Asia, we've gotten pretty used to those prices. I know. We used to be able to go and eat a full meal, each have a glass of wine and have an appetizer and two mains for $30. Yeah, that's, here, you're $140, $150, so you guys might hear me joke sometimes, but honestly, one week here in Hawaii is about the price of being in Thailand for a month and a half. And we're not rich. I know people, even though we keep saying that to people, we'll meet people and be like, I assume that you just have a lot of money because you can travel full time and that's not the case at all. So stuff like this hurts. Oh, it hurts. We're YouTubers. There's not a lot of rich YouTubers. It's a few, and not us. Yeah, definitely, and not us. So we just try to make our money work, but the thing is, we love the United States and we love coming here. We wanted to come to Hawaii, so it has to be done. We're just still getting over the sticker shock, let's go with that. One thing though, the food here is so delicious. We went out right away when we got here back to the United States and we couldn't wait to eat some American food and it just did not disappoint. Yeah, because Asian food is delicious, but in general, they don't do Western food that well. You can find places, but most of the time, it's only mediocre as far as Western food goes. So it's great to be back in the U.S., in North America, and be having some delicious burgers. Brunch. Bloody Marys. Once we get to Canada, we'll get some bloody Caesars because they're better. Sorry, guys. But we're just stoked to be back. I think you guys can tell. Another thing I wanted to mention, just here, walking around the streets of Honolulu at night, it's just so lit up. All the buildings are colorful and it just makes you want to be outside. It's really inviting. This is definitely a place that you want to be out after dark because it really lights up. It's beautiful. We're so stoked that we came here. We are going to have one more video coming up. And just in case you're new around here, it's Trevor and Anna, Delightful Travelers. Hit subscribe and leave us a like. That helps us out. Heck, leave a comment if you're not new. We love that you guys come back each and every week. But I think that's going to be it for the video today. We have to get prepared for the next video, which is coming up tomorrow. Yeah, we have a lot of planning to do. Yeah, by that, we have nothing really. I think we're going to get out of Honolulu and try to see a little bit of the island. So, yeah, we need to get on top of that right now. Yeah, go plan. Also, big thanks to all our channel members and patrons. Without you guys, we probably wouldn't be here. So, it's time to wrap up. All right, guys, that's it. From Hawaii, wishing you delightful travels. See you soon.