One of the best things about having HawaiiMagazine .com as a complement to our print publication HAWAII Magazine has been the ability to bring you even more of the Islands.

Travel news and tips. Kilauea volcano news as it happens. Videos. Photos from readers like you. More culture, activities and food. And starting this weekend, an expanded Web version of HAWAII Magazine’s Best Calendar.

Still, one of HawaiiMagazine.com’s extras we’ve been happiest to see grow in popularity has been our expanding collection of photo slideshows.

We’re longtime island residents here at HAWAII. But we still love doing the same thing visitors do when they travel the Islands: Take photos. Lots of photos. More photos than we could ever run in HAWAII Magazine.

The only logical thing to do? Share them, of course.

We posted our first photo gallery—a collection of shots taken at this year’s Lantern Floating Hawaii ceremony on Oahu (see below)—on our Picasa Web Albums site in May. Ten more galleries have gone up since—taking viewers with us on trips to five of the Hawaiian Islands.

Photographer David Croxford and editor John Heckathorn brought back photos and tales from travels to the Hana coast of Maui, Hawi and Kapaau on Hawaii’s Big Island and the road to Waimea Canyon on Kauai. Croxford and writer Chris Bailey contributed a visit to the Pacific Aviation Museum on Oahu. With photographer Dawn Sakamoto, I’ve posted galleries of the popular Saturday Farmers Market at Kapiolani Community College on Oahu and a journey to the little-traveled island of Lanai.

Click here for all of HawaiiMagazine.com's slideshows. Keep checking back with us for more in the months to come. And be sure to bring your camera wherever you go in Hawaii.

We promise to do the same.

 

For this month’s Hidden Hawaii slideshow, we take you to the picturesque Hana coast on the island of Maui.

Once again, photographer David Croxford and HAWAII Magazine editor John Heckathorn took roads less traveled in search of hidden treasures in familiar places. They took a single road this time—the notoriously narrow and winding Hana Highway from Keanae to Kipahulu, which hugs Maui’s rustic, gloriously tropical northeast coast.

From Kahului, they negotiated Hana Highway’s 52 miles, 59 bridges and 600 curves to get to the sleepy coastal town of Hana. Once there, they did something only a surprising few who visit the area do: stick around. For three days.

That gave them a good chunk of  time to really explore the Hana coast’s fascinating sights and meet the people who call it home.

As on previous Hidden Hawaii sojourns to Hawi and Kapaau on the Big Island and the road to Waimea Canyon on Kauai, Croxford brought back hundreds of photos. You’ll find a couple dozen of them and Heckathorn’s stories from the road in the November/December 2008 issue of HAWAII Magazine.

Here’s the best of the rest—the photos that made us jealous we didn’t come along for the ride. Click on the slideshow screen for larger photos.
 
 

It’s time to catch up with our Web posts again!

Whether you’re new to
HawaiiMaga-
zine.com or one of our regular visitors, we know how it is. Sometimes you miss two, or even a whole week’s worth, of our daily posts while they’re still on the homepage.

A couple months back, we brought some of our best posts of 2008 back to the homepage—as links—for our readers who may have missed them. That first “best of “ post proved such a hit, we decided to catch you up again—this time with our favorite posts since then.

We’ve put together more than 375 posts in total so far this year—all of ‘em still here at HawaiiMagazine.com. Short features on Hawaii’s people, places, and products. Travel tips. Videos. Slideshows. Lists. And countless updates on all of the activity at Kilauea volcano.

You could click “next entries” at the bottom of the home page, or search by month using the “Hawaii Today Archives” links in the left column. 

But let’s make it easy. Click the links below to catch up with HawaiiMagazine.com’s favorite recent posts:

Lava lake revealed roiling below Kilauea volcano

8 Tips for sun protection in Hawaii

The Great HAWAII Magazine POG-Off!

Hidden Hawaii: On the way to Waimea Canyon

Searching for Hawaii’s coconut pies

VIDEO: Ash burst at Kilauea volcano plume

Hundreds show up for “Lost” casting. I audition, sort of.

Exploring the Pacific Aviation Museum at Pearl Harbor

Char’s Chopsticks: Uncle Bobo’s Smoked BBQ

It's still Obama-rama in Hawaii

Library luau cheers 50 years of Hawaii statehood, 365 days too early

Road trip: Driving to North Kohala and back

Waimea Valley reopens

Hawaii's explosive new beaches. Hold the surfboard. Bring a camera.
  

This month we again bring you Hidden Hawaii. Last issue, photographer David Croxford and I visited the small Big Island towns of Hawi and Kapaau.

This month we hit the road to Western Kauai. Many visitors, especially those staying in popular Poipu, drive up to Waimea Canyon. But they often speed through the charming towns along the way, Hanapepe and Waimea. Croxford and I lingered in those towns, meeting the folks who have restored them to vitality.

Then—because we had some extra hours on a bright sunny day—we couldn’t resist a drive along Kauai’s astounding Waimea Canyon. Croxford snapped hundreds of photos. We published a couple dozen in the September/October 2008 issue of HAWAII Magazine. But here are another 85, which should give you an in-depth view of these towns.

Click on the slideshow screen for larger photos.

 
 

For our first Hidden Hawaii photo essay (in HAWAII's July/August 2008 issue), our photographer David Croxford and editor John Heckathorn visited North Kohala on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Their goal? To show off the peninsula’s once shuttered, now newly vibrant plantation towns—Hawi and Kapa'au—and breathtaking Pololu Valley lookout.  It’s an area seldom seen by visitors.

They shot so many photos, we had to post a slideshow here on HawaiiMagazine.com. People liked it so much, we’ll do the same in a few weeks for Croxford’s and Heckathorn’s upcoming photo essay on Hanapepe and Waimea—small towns on the way to east Kauai’s majestic Waimea Canyon and Koke'e State Park.

But back to the duo’s North Kohala photos. I was born and raised on the Big Island, but had never seen the Hawi and Kapa'au captured by David and John. So on a recent trip home I not only visited North Kohala again for the first time in a decade, I made sure to take some shots of my drive there.

I took a different route. Heckathorn and Croxford drove both ways along the hot and dry coastline's Akoni Pule Highway. On my way back, I cut over to Highway 270, which climbs its 20 miles up and over the lush green, mist-shrouded pasturelands of the island’s Kohala mountain to the picturesque ranch town of Kamuela.

Here’s a slideshow of what I saw along the way. (Click the center of the frame to enlarge.)

  

We know how it is.

You go out of town on a vacation or a business trip. You have family or friends from out of town staying at the house for a week. You get slammed at the office. There’s a weeklong marathon of Magnum P.I. episodes on cable.

When daily life intrudes, you can’t find a few minutes to check out our daily updates.

Whatever the reason … we understand: Sometimes you miss one of our fine Hawaii Today posts while it’s on the homepage.

Our Hawaii Today posts never disappear. You can always find them—going all the way back January—by clicking “next entries” at the bottom of  the home page. There are now more than 300 posts on all things Hawaii. (Trust us, we counted ‘em.)

Still, we thought it’d be a good idea to bring some of our best stuff back up to the top of the homepage again—as links—in case you missed them. If you like it, we’ll do it every few weeks.

Here’s the first bunch:

• Vintage photos show bygone Hawaii from soldiers' view

• Pssst! Want to see an amazing new Kilauea volcano photo?

• New Kilauea volcano land collapses explosively into ocean

• Kilauea volcano magma meets ocean with 100-foot lava burst

• "Explosion-like" earthquakes, lava fountains stir Kilauea volcano

• Hawi was great! What about Lanai?

• Hidden Hawaii: Hawi and Beyond

• Free Hawaii trip up for grabs

• The Koko Crater Trail. I climb it.

• It's O-bon season in Hawaii

• Scenes from Lantern Floating Hawaii ceremony

• Indiana Jones and the Eight Best Movies Filmed in Hawaii

• Char's Chopsticks: Dim sum at Mei Sum in Honolulu’s Chinatown district

• Jack Johnson and Kokua Festival: A fifth-row dispatch

• My Favorite Places: Thurston Lava Tube

• Remembering Mauna Loa's last eruption

• Maui’s humpback whales

• Hawaii's state parks: Worth a visit?

  

For our July/August 2008 issue, photographer David Croxford and I took a trip to North Kohala, a seldom-visited peninsula that sticks up like a green thumb at the top of the Big Island of Hawaii.

The little plantation towns of the peninsula—Hawi and Kapaau—almost disappeared two decades ago. Their buildings were shuttered and decaying, but they have come most colorfully back to life, filled with galleries, shops, eateries you will find no place else.

It’s our job at HAWAII Magazine to bring you the hidden Hawaii. You can see the feature in our current issue—available at bookstores and newsstands, by print subscription and in a digital format you can download today.

But, of course, we took far more photos than we could ever fit in the magazine. For our Web readers, here’s a slideshow of more than 70 images that will take you on a journey to a part of the Big Island few visitors have seen.

Click on the slideshow screen for larger photos.