The Big Island's largest town and historic seat of government, Hilo sits at the base of Mauna Kea on a wide, rain-drenched bay. Its restored early-20th-century downtown, Japanese and tropical gardens, and farmers market offer an easy, walkable introduction to the island's laid-back east side, far removed from the resort atmosphere of the Kona Coast.
Hawaii Island: Waterfalls, Volcanoes, and Ancient Kingdoms
5 Days
Nicknamed the Big Island for good reason, Hawaii Island holds nearly every climate on Earth within a single afternoon's drive — misty rainforest canyons, an active volcanic caldera still venting sulfur into the sky, a snow-capped astronomical summit, and sun-scorched leeward coastlines lined with royal fishponds and coral reefs. This 5-day itinerary moves in a loop from lush, waterfall-fed East Hawaii, into the raw volcanic heart of the island, down through the historic Kona Coast, up to the ranchlands and royal temples of Kohala, and finally across the black-and-green sand beaches of the remote south. Few islands in the world offer this much geological and cultural range in so little time.
Day 1
Begin on the lush, rain-fed windward side of the island, where Hilo's tropical gardens and waterfalls give way to one of Hawaii's most dramatic valleys. This is a day of green — cascading water, jungle canyon walls, and taro-terraced valley floors — offering a striking contrast to the volcanic terrain still ahead.
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A short, paved rainforest loop trail leads through towering bamboo groves and wild ginger to two waterfalls, culminating at 442-foot Akaka Falls, one of the tallest and most photographed cascades in Hawaii, plunging into a fern-draped gorge below.
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The scenic Hamakua Coast highway winds along sea cliffs and through former sugar plantation towns, crossing dozens of one-lane bridges over ravines and streams tumbling toward the ocean, with roadside fruit stands and gulch overlooks inviting frequent stops along the way.
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Known as the "Valley of the Kings," Waipio was once the political and religious center of ancient Hawaii and home to the royal residence of Kamehameha I in his youth. A steep overlook at the valley's edge reveals a mile-wide, jungle-walled amphitheater with a black-sand beach and waterfalls at its far end — one of the most breathtaking viewpoints on the island, and a fitting close to a day spent tracing the island's wild, water-carved east side.
Day 2
Today is devoted entirely to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most geologically active places on Earth. From the steaming, mile-wide Kilauea Caldera to a scorched desert of ash and a lava tube tunneling through solid rock, the park compresses the entire creation story of the Hawaiian Islands into a single, walkable landscape. Trails here range from short paved loops to multi-day backcountry treks across raw lava fields, so plan the day around your appetite for adventure.
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The park's centerpiece, Kilauea Caldera, is a vast volcanic depression at the summit of one of the world's most active volcanoes. Within it, Halemaumau Crater — traditionally home to the fire goddess Pele — has repeatedly filled with a glowing lava lake in recent eruptions, and overlooks along the caldera rim offer some of the most dramatic volcanic views in the park.
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The Crater Rim Trail traces the edge of the summit caldera through native ohia forest and stark volcanic landscape. A highlight along the way, the Kilauea Iki Trail descends into a smaller adjacent crater that was a churning lava lake in a 1959 eruption, allowing hikers to walk across its now-solidified, still-steaming floor.
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This large, walkable lava tube formed roughly 500 years ago when the outer surface of a flowing river of lava cooled and hardened while molten rock continued to drain through the interior. Lit for its first several hundred feet, it offers an easy, otherworldly walk through a tunnel carved entirely by fire.
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This 19-mile road descends nearly 3,700 feet from the summit to the coast, passing a series of pit craters and vast fields of hardened lava from eruptions spanning decades. At road's end, the Holei Sea Arch — a dramatic lava-rock arch carved by relentless ocean waves — marks a dead stop where a 2018 eruption once buried the highway ahead.
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Mauna Ulu, meaning "growing mountain," is a volcanic shield that erupted almost continuously from 1969 to 1974, and the surrounding Mauna Ulu eruption area can be explored via a moderate hike across hardened lava flows to its collapsed summit crater. Ambitious hikers can continue along the Napau Trail toward Napau Crater, passing near Pu'u O'o, the vent responsible for a decades-long eruption that reshaped the island's Puna coastline.
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A quieter side road leads to the Hilina Pali Overlook, where a massive fault scarp drops toward the remote southern coastline far below. The Hilina Pali Trail descends steeply into this backcountry, crossing the arid, ash-covered Kau Desert, a stark landscape shaped by centuries of volcanic gas and acid rain that supports almost no vegetation.
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For serious backpackers, the remote Puna Coast Trail follows the park's wild southern shoreline past Apua Point, Ka Aha, and the palm-shaded backcountry camp at Halape, where a coral-sand beach sits improbably amid raw lava fields — a multi-day journey into some of the least-visited terrain on the island.
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An easy boardwalk trail near the coast leads to Pu'u Loa, the largest concentration of Hawaiian petroglyphs in the state, with more than 23,000 carved images and cupules etched into the pahoehoe lava — many left by families marking the birth of a child, a practice believed to have continued for centuries.
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Accessible from a high-elevation trailhead within the park, the Mauna Loa Trail climbs the flank of the largest volcano on Earth by volume toward Moku'aweoweo, its enormous summit caldera. The multi-day route passes Red Hill Cabin and the Mauna Loa Cabin near the summit, an extremely strenuous, high-altitude trek reserved for well-prepared and permitted backpackers.
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Perched directly on the caldera rim, this historic hotel has welcomed visitors — including Mark Twain — since 1846, making it one of the oldest continuously operating hotels in Hawaii. Its dining room offers unmatched views of Halemaumau, a fitting spot to end a day spent exploring the volcano.
Day 3
Descend to the sun-drenched Kona Coast, the historic center of the Hawaiian Kingdom's final years and the heart of the island's coffee country. This is a day of royal history and turquoise water in equal measure, moving between palaces, mission churches, sacred bays, and the working coffee farms that still climb the volcanic slopes above town.
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The seaside town of Kailua Kona was a favored retreat of Hawaiian royalty, and Hulihee Palace, a two-story New England-style mansion built in 1838, once served as their vacation home, now open as a museum of royal furnishings and portraits. Directly across the street, Mokuaikaua Church, built in 1837, stands as the oldest Christian church in Hawaii, its lava-rock walls and tall white steeple visible throughout downtown.
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Just south of town, Kahaluu Bay is one of the most accessible and reliable snorkeling spots on the island, its shallow, reef-protected waters home to green sea turtles and vibrant coral. The surrounding Keauhou district was itself once a center of Hawaiian chiefly power, with several restored fishponds and temple sites scattered along its coastline.
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This restored early-1900s coffee farm in the uplands above Kona offers a hands-on look at the region's famous coffee industry, with costumed interpreters demonstrating traditional roasting, drying, and farming methods on the same volcanic slopes still used by Kona coffee growers today.
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Known as the "Painted Church," St Benedict's Catholic Church features a vividly hand-painted interior meant to teach Bible stories to a largely illiterate 19th-century congregation. Nearby, the Amy B.H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden preserves native and Polynesian-introduced plants within an ancient field system once used by Hawaiian farmers to grow food on the dry lava slopes.
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This deep, protected bay is both a marine life conservation district renowned for exceptional snorkeling and the site of Captain James Cook's fatal encounter with Hawaiian islanders in 1779, marked today by a white obelisk visible across the water.
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Known historically as the "Place of Refuge," this sacred site once offered sanctuary to defeated warriors, non-combatants, and those who broke the ancient kapu system, sparing them a death sentence if they could reach its grounds. Restored temple platforms, carved wooden ki'i statues, and royal fishponds set against a black-lava shoreline make it one of the most evocative historical sites on the island.
Day 4
Head north into Kohala and Waimea, the island's ranching and royal heartland, where windswept grasslands surround the birthplace of Kamehameha the Great and one of the largest working cattle ranches in the United States. This is a day of open sky and deep history, tracing the rise of the man who unified the Hawaiian Islands before descending to the coast for two of the island's most celebrated white-sand beaches.
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Built by Kamehameha I in 1791 on the advice of a prophet who foretold it would help him conquer and unify the Hawaiian Islands, this massive lava-rock temple overlooking Kawaihae Bay remains one of the most historically significant structures in the state, its story bound directly to the founding of the unified Kingdom of Hawaii.
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Lapakahi preserves the stone foundations of an entire 600-year-old Hawaiian fishing village along a rugged, undeveloped coastline, offering a rare, tangible sense of daily pre-contact island life. Further north, the Kohala Historical Sites State Monument protects Mo'okini Heiau, one of the oldest and most sacred temples in Hawaii, along with the birthplace of Kamehameha the Great nearby.
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The small North Kohala town of Kapaau holds the original statue of King Kamehameha I, cast in Europe and shipwrecked en route before finally arriving here, closer to the king's birthplace than its more famous replica in Honolulu. The nearby Hokuloa Church, a simple 19th-century missionary chapel, adds a quiet, small-town counterpoint to the grand temples elsewhere in Kohala.
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The cool upland town of Waimea sits at the heart of Parker Ranch, one of the oldest and largest cattle ranches in the United States, founded in 1847 and still shaping the island's paniolo (Hawaiian cowboy) culture. Rolling green pastures and grazing cattle here feel a world apart from the volcanic coastline below.
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Descending back to the coast, Hapuna Beach State Recreation Area offers one of the largest and most consistently ranked white-sand beaches in Hawaii, with wide, gently sloping sand ideal for swimming. Just south, Waikoloa Beach anchors a well-developed resort area with calm coves, historic petroglyph fields, and ancient fishponds tucked between its hotels and golf courses.
Day 5
Your final day reaches toward the island's extremes — the snow-dusted summit of Mauna Kea, one of the best stargazing locations on Earth, and the remote, wind-scoured Kau District at the island's southern tip, home to beaches found almost nowhere else on the planet. Expect dramatic shifts in elevation, temperature, and landscape as the trip closes on the wildest edges of Hawaii Island.
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Rising nearly 13,800 feet above sea level, Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain in Hawaii and, measured from its base on the ocean floor, the tallest on Earth. Its summit hosts one of the world's premier astronomical observatory complexes thanks to exceptionally clear, dry air, and the visitor information station en route offers evening stargazing programs even for those not continuing to the restricted summit above.
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Sparsely populated and largely undeveloped, the Kau District occupies the island's remote southern flank, framed by Mauna Loa's slopes on one side and open ocean on the other. Small coffee farms, macadamia orchards, and long stretches of empty highway define a region that feels far removed from the resorts of Kona and Kohala.
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Formed from lava fragments shattered by contact with the sea, this striking black-sand beach is one of the most accessible and photographed in Hawaii, and regularly hosts basking Hawaiian green sea turtles along its shoreline.
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One of only a handful of green-sand beaches on Earth, Papakolea gets its unusual color from olivine crystals eroding out of an ancient cinder cone at South Point. Reaching it requires a rugged multi-mile walk or four-wheel-drive ride along an exposed coastal track, a fitting last adventure at the southernmost point in the United States.