Rainy Day in Hawaii? Check out Honolulu’s Best Museums

Taylor Kennedy, who works in the National Geographic Image Collection, recently traveled to Hawaii to gather the photographs of Paul Chesley, a photographer who has worked with National Geographic for decades shooting Asia and the South Pacific.

It happens; waking up to a forecast for rain on a beach vacation. It happened to me in Hawaii, and Honolulu’s museums pleasantly surprised me. Two of the visits became highlights of the trip.

The Honolulu Academy of Art has one of the best layouts of any museum I have been to anywhere in the world. Its collection is great, and walking through the sprawl of courtyards gives you a nice refreshing break between exhibits, while reminding you you are in Hawaii. These short walks gave my mind a rest too so I could digest what I just saw and helped prevent museum fatigue.

Be sure to eat at the café too–it is one of the best spots in town.

The Academy also provides tours of Doris Duke’s incredible house, Shangri La. Call ahead for your reservation and they will cart you off to her house perched high above the ocean and just below the Diamond Head volcanic crater. It is worth the trip just to learn about this eccentric, private, and passionate art lover whose incredible wealth enabled her to amass a beautiful collection of Islamic art–along with a quirky life story. Carved Moroccan ceilings, Persian tiles, Spanish furniture, Algerian objets d’art: the sheer volume of the collection in such a small house is stunning.

For Hawaiian history, I went directly to the Hawaiians. The Bishop Museum was built by Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi’s husband (at her request) to preserve and show Hawaiian culture to both Hawaiians and the world. It now houses the largest collection of Hawaiian art and history in the world–large parts of it have been donated by Hawaiian royalty.

Though I did not see as much as I would have liked of this complex in my first visit, I did have the luck to bump into Jimbo just before entering the Hawaiian hall. Jimbo was a docent giving a (free, half-hour) tour of some of the traditionally used plants of Hawaii. He was hilarious and full of factoids. He showed me how the kukui tree’s nuts were made into candles (naturally filled with so much oil you can just touch a match to them) and the hulls hollowed out by ants can form necklaces. He pointed out the hala plant, whose fronds are woven into the mats, hats, baskets that you see all over the island.

He demonstrated how a ti tree leaf becomes the aluminum foil of Polynesia. He introduced me to the taro plant that fed Polynesia for centuries and then took over his own garden (go test out a meal of it at Ono Hawaiian Foods on Kapahulu Blvd).

The highlight though was the breadfruit. We discussed how they were a staple food in Polynesia, with Captain Cook’s journals noting that just one of the groves measured a half-mile wide by 12 miles long. On an island only 44 miles long, that is a huge chunk of land for a single patch! It’s not found in grocery stores, so my curiosity was piqued, and Jimbo told me how to find a ripe one (the trees are all over in parks and gardens), which I did. Then I went home to my apartment, cooked it up, mixed it with coconut milk, and ate my interactive time-warp museum lesson. And it was a great day–which hadn’t gotten any rain after all.

[The Honolulu Academy of Art]

[Shangri La]

[The Bishop Museum]

[Ono Hawaiian Foods]

Photo: The Hawaiian Hall at the Bishop Museum, by Taylor Kennedy

For more fun things to do in Honolulu, read I Heart My City: Malia’s Honolulu