When Louis and I were visiting my Uncle in Hawaii, we knew we’d have to climb a crater. It’s just one of those things, right? Right outside of Honolulu is Hawaii Kai, the home of the Koko Crater. We set ourselves to embark up the Koko Crater, which was our view when we woke up in the mornings. The West side has an abandoned set of railway tracks that were apparently used during World War II to transport supplies and personnel to the top of the crater, a lookout point.

You’ve got to be on your game as climbing those tracks is no easy task. It seems so simple when looking from afar and even still when you start, but once you start you realize how steep it gets, and how thirsty you get, you realize you were wrong. Not to mention there are active runners and joggers in fancy running gear hopping between the wood beams like it’s easy breezy. This was no slice of pie!

Once at the top of Pu’u Mai, the crater’s highest peak, you forget that the hike was tiring as fuck un the heat and that you shouldn’t have brought a big bag (I was that person). The view beyond Sandy Beach and Hanauma bay, the whole Eastern shoreline of Oahu all the way to Honolulu with the blue blue ocean as far as you can see you simply makes you realize how beautiful the world is and just how small we humans are. We wandered around the top for a little while, checking out the abandoned dollies, manmade cells and huge cement platforms that are left from World War II. The are wild flowers and dirt trails, obviously a lot of tourists, but a panoramic view that made my heart skip a few beats. We just sat and gazed off into the distance.

On a sidenote, going down was actually quite stressful with the railway beams just far enough apart to make it difficult and all those marathon-like runners literally running down next to us. That was our only work out while visiting Hawaii. There’s even a Yelp for this hike, ha!