Hilo

Top things to do in Hilo

1. 01

   Hawaii Volcanoes National Park - the caldera, the steam vents and the lava tube

   nature wildlife hiking scenic 👍 Popular

   The reason most people base themselves in Hilo, and about forty-five minutes up Highway 11 through eucalyptus and cane country. The rim drive skirts a summit crater that collapsed and deepened dramatically in 2018, past ground that steams where rainwater hits hot rock and a sulphur-stained bank that smells like it sounds. Below the rim, a walk-through lava tube runs under tree-fern forest, and Chain of Craters Road drops thousands of feet to a coast where an old flow rolled straight over the highway. Whether there is lava to see on any given day is luck, not planning, so check the park's status before you drive up and treat an eruption as a bonus rather than the point.

2. 02

   Mauna Kea - sunset and stars from the visitor station

   nature wildlife scenic adventure 👍 Popular

   An hour from town on Saddle Road, then up the mountain access road to the visitor information station at around nine thousand feet, where you stop to acclimatise and where most people should stay. The air is thin and cold enough that the temperature swing from Hilo is the shock of the trip. Beyond the station the road turns to graded dirt, needs four-wheel drive, and is not for hire cars, altitude-sensitive passengers or anyone planning to linger after dark. The summit is also a sacred landscape in Native Hawaiian tradition and a live political dispute over telescope building, which is worth understanding before you go up rather than after.

3. 03

   Rainbow Falls - the waterfall at the edge of downtown

   nature wildlife scenic 👍 Popular

   The Wailuku River drops over a lava ledge into a round green pool about five minutes from the town centre, throwing the rainbow it is named for when the morning sun gets behind the mist. There is a car park at the top and a viewing rail thirty seconds from it, which is unusual for a waterfall of this size. The cave under the ledge is where the goddess Hina is said to have lived, and the enormous banyan grove up the steps beside the lookout is worth the extra two minutes.

4. 04

   Pacific Tsunami Museum - the two waves that made the modern town

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   A small museum in a heavy 1930s bank building on the bayfront, built around the 1946 and 1960 tsunamis that destroyed this waterfront twice within a generation. It is mostly survivor testimony, photographs of the wave in the bay and the science of how a Pacific-wide warning system was assembled afterwards. An hour here explains the shape of Hilo better than anything else in town, including why the block you are standing on has a park where its buildings used to be.

5. 05

   Imiloa Astronomy Center - navigation and telescopes under one roof

   culture arts history ⭐ Highly recommended

   Three titanium cones on the university campus above town, housing a planetarium and an exhibition that deliberately runs two stories side by side: the Polynesian wayfinders who crossed the Pacific by star, swell and bird, and the observatories on the mountain that look at the same sky now. It handles the tension between them honestly instead of smoothing it over, the planetarium shows are excellent, and it is the best possible rainy afternoon in a town with many of them.

6. 06

   Akaka Falls State Park - the loop walk to a long drop

   nature wildlife scenic

   About twenty-five minutes north, above the old sugar village of Honomu, a paved loop of well under a mile runs through bamboo, ginger and enormous philodendron to a lookout facing a ribbon of water falling more than four hundred feet into a bowl. A second, wider falls appears through the trees on the far side of the loop. It is short, steep in places, and reliably running given how much rain this coast takes.

7. 07

   Liliuokalani Gardens - Edo-style ponds on Hilo Bay

   scenic culture arts

   Thirty-odd acres of Japanese garden laid out on the bayfront in the early twentieth century in honour of the island's Japanese plantation immigrants, and named for the last queen of Hawaii. Arched bridges, stone lanterns, a torii, a teahouse and tidal ponds that rise and fall with the sea, with Mauna Kea behind it on the days the mountain is out. It survived both tsunamis, which is part of why the land around it was never rebuilt on.

8. 08

   Hilo Farmers Market - the produce corner on Mamo Street

   food

   The market at the downtown corner runs daily and swells to full size on its two big days, when the stalls take over the block: rambutan, mangosteen, apple bananas, dragonfruit, taro, orchids by the armful, and a run of prepared-food stalls behind. It is a genuine growers' market on an island that can produce almost anything, not a craft market with vegetables attached, and it is at its best early.

9. 09

   Coconut Island - the footbridge islet in the bay

   scenic

   A small islet off the Japanese garden, reached on a pedestrian bridge, historically a place of healing and refuge and now a picnic lawn with a stone tower that local kids jump off into the harbour. The whole circuit takes fifteen minutes and gives you the best view back at the town, the bay and the two mountains stacked behind it.

10. 10

    Banyan Drive - the avenue of planted banyans

    scenic history

    The hotel road around the Waiakea peninsula is lined with huge banyans, each planted by a visiting name from the 1930s onwards and each carrying a little plaque saying who. It is a short, shaded drive or a good walk, and it links the hotels to the Japanese garden and the islet at the far end.

11. 11

    Boiling Pots and Peepee Falls - the river's stepped basins

    nature wildlife scenic

    A couple of minutes upstream from Rainbow Falls, the Wailuku River runs through a chain of round pools scoured into old lava. After heavy rain, water pushes between them underground and the pools churn and boil, which is the whole show and depends entirely on how much has fallen. Viewing is from the lookout only; the river is far more dangerous than it looks and people drown in it.

12. 12

    Kaumana Caves - walking into an 1881 lava tube

    adventure nature wildlife

    A county park on the road up out of town where a stairway drops into a collapsed skylight in the lava tube that fed the flow which stopped at the edge of Hilo in 1881. Two directions of unlit tube lead off from the bottom, with roots hanging through the roof and glassy drips frozen on the walls. Bring a proper torch and sturdy shoes; there is no lighting, no handrail and a lot of loose rock.

13. 13

    Richardson Ocean Park - black sand, turtles and a sheltered snorkel

    nature wildlife

    The end of the Keaukaha coast road, where a lava shelf makes a protected pocket of black sand and clear water fed by cold freshwater springs. It is the best easy snorkelling in Hilo, with green turtles grazing the shallow rock most days, and it gets busy with local families at weekends. Bring reef shoes for the lava.

14. 14

    Onekahakaha Beach Park - the walled pool for small children

    nature wildlife

    A shallow, boulder-walled saltwater pond on the same stretch of coast, warm, calm and about knee deep, which makes it the toddler beach for the whole town. Grass, ironwood shade and picnic pavilions behind it. The unprotected water beyond the wall is a different proposition entirely and is not for swimming.

15. 15

    Lyman Museum and Mission House - missionary Hilo and the island's rocks

    history culture arts

    The 1839 house of a missionary family, the oldest wood-frame building on the island, with the furniture and the wavy window glass they arrived with, alongside a modern museum next door covering the island's volcanic geology, its Hawaiian material culture and the plantation migrations. The mineral collection is far better than a town this size has any business having.

16. 16

    Hawaii Tropical Bioreserve and Garden - the ravine garden above Onomea Bay

    nature wildlife scenic

    A privately made botanical garden a short drive north, dropping down a stream ravine through palms, gingers, orchids and enormous heliconia to a rocky bay with a waterfall at its head. Boardwalks the whole way, humid as a glasshouse, and reached along the four-mile scenic detour off the highway that is worth taking for itself.

17. 17

    Kilauea Iki Trail - crossing the floor of a 1959 lava lake

    hiking nature wildlife

    The best walk in the national park and the one to do if you only do one: a loop of a few miles that descends through dripping rainforest into a crater, then crosses its flat, cracked black floor, still steaming in places, under the cinder cone that fountained lava nearly two thousand feet high in 1959. The far side climbs back out through ohia forest. Cairns mark the crossing, there is no shade on the floor, and the weather up there is nothing like the coast.

18. 18

    Downtown Hilo - the plantation-era bayfront blocks

    culture arts history

    Two or three walkable streets of low timber and concrete storefronts from the sugar years, saved from demolition largely by the fact that the town's money left, and now holding galleries, second-hand bookshops, a restored 1920s cinema still running films and live shows, and the counter restaurants that serve the town. The seaward side of the street is grass, because the buildings that stood there are gone.

19. 19

    Panaewa Rainforest Zoo and Gardens - the small zoo in the rain

    nature wildlife

    A county zoo south of town set in genuine rainforest, small and homely, with a white tiger as its headline resident along with lemurs, a peacock population that has clearly gone feral, and a good collection of tropical plants. Boardwalks and cover throughout, so it works on the sort of day that shuts everything else down.

20. 20

    Big Island Candies - the shortbread factory on the industrial edge

    food

    A confectionery works with a viewing window onto the production floor, where macadamia shortbread is dipped in chocolate at some speed, and a shop that hands out samples with coffee. It is unashamedly a factory outlet and it is also the single most reliable gift purchase on the island, which is why half of Hilo's visitors end up here.

21. 21

    Honolii Beach Park - the town's surf break

    surfing

    A river-mouth break just north of the centre, cut into a black cove with a steep stairway down and a clifftop car park that doubles as the grandstand. It is where Hilo surfs, from schoolkids after class to the old guard, and it is a local wave rather than a visitor one; the rip at the river mouth is real and the water goes brown after rain.

Getting to & around Hilo

Know before you go