5 Things No One Tells You About Oahu
What do you imagine when you think of Oahu or any other Hawaiian island? Likely tons of palm trees, pristine beaches, and lots of greenery. While this is definitely all true, there is much more to Oahu that most people likely will not tell you!
In this blog post, we’ll list five things that you may not know prior to visiting Oahu for the first time. And these are usually not things that people who visit Oahu come back home to tell you about! Let’s dive in!
1. Helicopters & Fighter Jets Overhead All Day Long
You may or may not know that Oahu has several military bases. Hawaii is actually the headquarters of the United States Pacific Command (USPACOM), which is made up of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. Because of this, there are helicopters and fighter jets flying overhead all the time, and we found this especially so in Honolulu. This is perhaps good to be aware of as if you are planning a trip to Oahu and are expecting an extremely quiet time laying on a beach in Honolulu, you’d come away quite disappointed!
2. 7-Lane Motorways
You can likely imagine lanes among lanes of motorways (or freeways, or highways) in an American city like Los Angeles, but you may not expect this on an island like Oahu. If that’s the case, prepare to be surprised! According to the 2021 TomTom Traffic Index, Honolulu comes in 7th worst in the US for traffic congestion. We were utterly gobsmacked when we came upon 7 lanes of traffic on a motorway one afternoon leaving Honolulu! As well, the roads are not very well maintained with potholes all over. At one point, we sunk into a pothole so deep we thought we’d wrecked the tyre (thankfully we didn’t)!
3. Honolulu is Very Americanised
You might already know that Honolulu is a very busy city, but for some reason, it still felt very bizarre to see The Cheesecake Factory (a popular North American restaurant chain, for our non-North American readers) and American department stores like Macy’s and Nordstrom on Oahu. The fact that Honolulu is very Americanised can be a good or bad thing of course, depending on what kind of holiday you are looking for and what you are expecting. Personally, we didn’t spend too much time in areas like Waikiki and instead tried to visit other areas of the island.
Be sure to check out our YouTube video featuring Oahu!
4. Homelessness
There is a big homelessness issue in Oahu. As of January 2020, there were 4,448 homeless people on Oahu, and people are displaced for many differing reasons, which we won’t dive into in this blog post. This is just to bring your attention to the fact that there is a homelessness issue on Oahu so that you’re not caught off guard.
5. Hawaii's Flag
This last point may seem a bit random and is not restricted to Oahu but is something we were surprised by. While driving around Oahu, we were initially perplexed as to why we kept seeing flags outside houses and even on the backs of trucks that had a UK flag on it, as flags with Union Jacks are usually for British Overseas Territories. Upon a quick Google search, we realised that we were seeing the Hawaii flag! The Hawaii flag is the only US state flag that has the flag of another country on it.
The Union Jack was originally included to mark the Royal Navy’s historical relations with the Hawaiian Kingdom and they just continued to use the same flag even after the Hawaiian Kingdom was no more. A fun fact is that the Hawaii flag’s Union Jack is proportioned differently from the Union Jack in British Overseas Territories’ flags - Hawaii’s Union Jack is a 4:7 ratio while British Overseas Territories’ Union Jacks are a 1:2 ratio. You can see the difference in the images below.
Flag of Hawaii
Flag of Ascension Island, a British Overseas Territory
These are just a few things that we think no one would tell you about Oahu. What was the most interesting? What else might you add? Let us know in the comments!
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In this blog post, we list out a few things that you may not know (and that people may not tell you!) prior to visiting Oahu for the first time, including 7-lane motorways and more!