Hawaii For Dummies, 4th Edition

by Cheryl Farr Leas, John Rosenthal

The first part of planning your trip to Hawaii is to decide which island (or islands) you want to explore—Oahu, Maui, Big Island, or Kauai. This guide helps you with descriptions so vivid you can almost feel the breeze and smell the hibiscus, plumeria, and orchids. Whether you want to watch daredevil wave riders and windsurfers or become one yourself, sip mai tais and soak up the sun or seek out adventure and action, relax in the lap of luxury or swim with the fishes, this guide helps you make the most of your Hawaiian vacation with information Like every For Dummies travel guide, Hawaii For Dummies , Fourth Edition, Just a word of warning—while this guide is designed to help you plan your trip, please don’t plan every minute.  Leave yourself plenty of time to relax and experience the laid-back, generous spirit of genuine aloha.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction

532 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

Reviews

[Jessica Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Use this book to plan your trip!!!!

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

My friend and I are planning to travel to Hawaii Islands this spring, she for the first time, whereas I actually lived on Oahu nearly 40 years ago, thereby making me the "expert" between the two of us. That being said, I quickly realized that things nowadays are undoubtedly VERY different from the way they were back then, so some updated research was in order for our trip to be successful. This book was an excellent place to start. It is chock full of good information, including general and specific travel tips, suggestions of what to see and what to not waste your time on, recommendations about transportation, lodging, entertainment and dining, when to rent a car for sightseeing versus relying instead on commercial tour companies, plus general cultural information that will come in handy throughout our trip to the islands. I took lots of notes and plan to contact many of the suggested business entities as our planning process proceeds. There are no photos in this book, just text and maps, but that's exactly what I needed -- the pretty pictures will be in "tour guides," which this is not. If I need to see what a certain place looks like, I can Google it. This is intended to get you started planning your trip from the ground up, and I appreciated that. What I came away from this was more than a skeleton of an itinerary, which is what we needed to get started. Aloha!

[Tess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I can't really say if this was a great guide or not until after the trip. But it seemed to be pretty exhaustive. The only thing that bothers me is that I don't think I share any tastes with the author, so I'm skeptical of her reviews of different restaurants and attractions. She's the kind of person who thinks you should leave all your regular clothes behind and wear only hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. FAIL. Going on vacay doesn't mean you leave your personality on the mainland, gringo.

[Sori · Rating 2 out of 5]

In addition to sightseeing, one of my favorite pasttimes is eating, and a lot of the restaurant recommendations in this book were not great. And one of the recommended spots to snorkel (I believe it was sold as one of the top ten in the world) sucked! 15 minutes in and I was already hoping a shark would show up just to make it less boring.

[Kendall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't wait to travel to Hawaii! This book is helping me plan ahead before heading to the travel agent. For someone who has never been to Hawaii, reading this book gives me an idea of what to do, where to go, and how to budget.

[Sara Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love the Dummies series for traveling. Used on our honeymoon and took it everywhere we went!

[Niza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as
Hawaii Eyewitness Travel.
Some good sections but too much info that I could not use for this trip.

[Aimee · Rating 4 out of 5]

very useful when planning and taking a trip to Hawaii