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The weather
By Robert Bone
Special to The Advertiser
Well, the ancient Hawaiians had no word for weather, but that may be more a lingual deficiency than anything else. Let the record show they did have words for rain, storm, hot, cold, and even snow.
Most visitors to the islands seem to sum up the conversations about weather and climate in one word – ideal. But that’s only part of the story.
In the parts of Hawaii that most visitors see, you’ll find daytime temperatures generally in the 70s and 80s on the Fahrenheit scale at any time of year, and the humidity is just elevated enough to provide a friendly caress to your cheek after you step into Hawaii from the cold, dry air of a jumbo jet. Hawaii, of course, is in the subtropics; seldom do you feel the moist, oppressive humidity found in the truly tropical zones of the Caribbean or the South Pacific.
It is true that spring and fall are almost abstract concepts in Hawaii. We usually can define only two seasons – summer, from May through October, and winter, from November through April.
Generally speaking, it rains a little more in the winter time, but even that depends lot on where you are. The mountainous areas get most of it, and usually on the "windward" or northeast sides of the islands. For example, Waikiki, home of luxury hotels and that famous beach, statistically is one of the drier parts of the Island of Oahu.
Hilo, the county seat on the windward side of the Big Island of Hawaii, has a rainy reputation, but local boosters like to point out that most of the waterfalls at night or in the morning hours only. By the afternoon, things are usually bright and, of course, very green, due to all that precipitation.
Big Islanders are also familiar with snow. During the winter, they can see it far away atop Mauna Kea, the 13,000 dormant volcano, which wears a mantle of white on the lava slopes far above the tree line. But if it’s not snowing, the air is among the clearest in the world, which is the reason Mauna Kea is now home to a forest of astronomic observatories.
In Hawaiian, incidentally, mauna is the word for mountain, kea the word for white. On the roads connecting the observatories is the only place where you might see a snowplow sporting Hawaiian license plates.
Two other mountains occasionally sport a dusting of snow at their summits during the winter. One is Mauna Loa, an officially active volcano, also on the Big Island, and an important feature of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The other is Haleakala, the 10,000-foot dormant volcano that is the centerpiece of Haleakala National Park on Maui.
Hot temperatures? They can happen, notably during the summer in the dry, desert areas on the Kona and Kohala Coasts of the Big Island. Another place notorious for its heat is Lahaina, the historic village on West Maui. La is Hawaiian for sun, and haina means merciless or cruel.
TIP: Never travel to Lahaina on Maui without renting an air-conditioned car, winter or summer.
A few last words on rain. The rainiest spot on earth is supposed to be at the summit of Waialeale, the virtually always cloud-covered center of the Island of Kauai. Yet one of the driest areas of Hawaii, Waimea Canyon, lies right at the doorstop of Waialeale.
Visitors to Hawaii are seldom bothered by rain. Every winter, there will be one or two periods of several wet days in a row. But those are the exceptions to the rule. Normally rain arrives in brief, highly localized periods, giving rise to a famous island saying: "If the rain bothers you, just wait five minutes or drive five miles."
Travel writer Robert W. Bone is a successful journalist, editor and photographer. He is the author of "The Maverick Guide to Hawaii."
