It’s extraordinarily easy to take Hawaiʻi at vacation value: the water really is that blue, the views really are that good, and an alarming amount of personal resolve can disappear in the vicinity of an infinity pool. But it is also a place whose culture, land, and history have been packaged for visitors for generations, often with much of their complexity edited out. Which leaves the conscientious visitor wanting to see more than the version designed for them—without turning that effort into its own self-congratulatory checklist.
Perhaps the first rule of being a good tourist, then, is accepting that you are, in fact, a tourist. You are there briefly, you will leave eventually, and you are not “discovering” some secret version of the place available only to sufficiently thoughtful travelers. With that in mind, I decided on a more realistic ambition for my week-long trip to Hawaiʻi this spring: to pay closer attention to what was already in front of me.
