Here are some famous tourist attractions on the island of Oahu.

The city of Waikiki is visited by 9 out of 10 of the 5 million tourists that visit Oahu each year.  Waikiki is an on-the-go city with traffic noise 24 hours a day.  Staying here is said to "put you in the heart of it all" and it's almost always crowded.  Waikiki is backed by 175 high-rise hotels and hundreds of restaurants all in a 1 1/2 square-mile beach zone.

Diamond Head Crater is just one of the many attractions on the island of Oahu.  Diamond Head was created by a volcanic explosion about half a million years ago.  It is about a .7 mile hike to the top of the 750 foot volcanic cone, where you can see 360-degrees of the Waikiki coast.

Another attraction on the beautiful, Hawaiian island Oahu is the Arizona Memorial.  This WWII memorial was actually built on top of the USS Arizona that was sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.  The memorial was shaped oddly with a sunken middle to show that America stood tall through this tragedy, but also mourns for those who perished in the attack.  If you look closely, you can see the top of the ship that sits only 6 feet under the water.

The USS Missouri is another WWII memorial on the island of Oahu.  This is a 58,000-ton battleship that is relatively new to the WWII memorial family, having just joined it in 1999.  This was the ship on which the Japanese signed their surrender to WWII on September 2nd, 1945.  It was retired in 1955, but then modernized in 1986 to help the navy fight the Persian Gulf War until it was retired for good in 1992.  In 1998, Hawaii won the right to keep the ship and moved it to Pearl Harbor where one year later it was turned into a memorial.

Home                                                                               Facts to Know                                                                                Kauai