surfresearch.com.au  c. r. sail : waikiki and hilo, 1892

Altogether I have never looked on a view so splendid in colouring as Honolulu seen from the sea on a bright afternoon in March. (I think I have already mentioned that the afternoon light is the best of all lights to see scenery in.)
At Waikiki the sea comes rolling in over coral reefs, and within them is yellow sand, and safety from sharks, so that one may bathe
here at one's ease.
(I fetched the Japanese bathing-woman completely by talking to her in her own language.
By the way, how terrible a Japanese woman looks in a " holoku."
Designed for the big fleshy women of the Sandwich Islands, this night-gown for day wear is outrageously unbecoming on the petite female of Japan.)
Further, at Waikiki are royal residences and lanais, and a public park and racecourse lying close under Diamond Head — the
great bare dead giant that shuts in the bay on the East.

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Yet, at length we reach Hilo, famed for its beauty ; but to-day it is all veiled in grey mist and drifting cloud-wrack.
It is really quite tropical ; I could almost fancy

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myself back in some little town on the Tenasserim Coast.
We were very eager to see the " surf-riding " of the Hiloan bathers — a most graceful and skilful sport, they say ; but there was not surf enough, and we could not.
(Yet, how that ship did roll !
What in thunder would she have done if there had been a good sea on ?)

[Sail, C. R. ] An Anglo - Indian Globe Trotter : Farthest East South And West Notes Of A Journey Home  Through Japan Australasia And America. W. H. Allen & Co Ltd., London, 1892. Internet Archive http://archive.org/details/cu31924023257037

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