Category Archives: Hawaii

Hanauma Bay for the chronically overprepared

Posted on December 22, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I enjoy writing about things I can’t find online. Here I wrote a snorkeling guide to Hanauma Bay for those of us that must obsessively research before our trips. I wish someone had written one before my trip. Continue reading →

Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, Hawaii, Travel | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Kayak to Kaneohe Sandbar – sunken at high tide

Posted on December 18, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

On a windy and rainy day in November, I rented a kayak from Go Bananas, and drove to He’eia Kea Boat Harbor. I launched off towards where I thought the legendary Kaneohe Sandbar would be.

For the entire trip to the sandbar, I paddled alone in a foreboding ocean. Perhaps “bay” is a more accurate description. But from my low vantage point, it looked as if I were in the middle of the wide wide sea under dark clouds. I aimed for Kapapa Island as told. And that was good advice. Because from my kayak, all I could see were breaking waves in every direction, except for that tiny speck of an island in the distance.

I kept turning my kayak back towards the harbor, second-guessing the sanity of my choice. I saw dark clouds pouring rain over entire towns. I pivoted back towards Kapapa Island and paddled some more, all the while frightened to the core and utterly alone.

I reached the last boat in sight, hoping to find tourists having a great time. But it was empty, silent and moored in deep water. No sandbar to be seen. I swung back facing the harbor. I again turned towards Kapapa. I kept going.

After what seemed like a lifetime, I sensed a change in water color. Shortly the sun poked its head out from behind clouds. And magic happened. The sea all around me turned turquoise as soon as sunlight touched them, revealing that I was merely a foot above the sand now. I got why this place is also known as the Sunken Island. Continue reading →

Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, Hawaii, Travel | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Why does my snorkel mask fog up?

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

In the year 2025, there are plenty of resources online that answer the question: why does my snorkel mask keep fogging up? Before my 2025 trip to Hawaii, I consulted numerous YouTube videos and Reddit discussions on this topic. Chiefly I wanted to avoid repeating my sub-optimal snorkeling experiences from the 2015 cruise trip and the 2009 trip to Trunk Bay and Caneel Bay. One regrettable aspect of these past trips was that I couldn’t stop my lenses from fogging up when snorkeling, despite having done what I perceived to be adequate preparation.

Not surprisingly, today’s online resources are actually worse than in 2009 and 2015. Blogs with insightful resources have gone dark, long replaced by either inaccessible tribal social media, or exceedingly-short clickbait clips tailored to today’s audience. Chiefly the latter peddles quick fixes showing the “hows”, but not the “whys”. The thing is, lens-defogging, like most things in life, follows Tolstoy’s law – that every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a long list of things that each alone can fog up your lenses. You need to remediate each and every one of them, to get to the “happy path”.

During my 2025 trip, I finally attained defogging nirvana. I experienced crystal-clear views from my mask for two hours of snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, for the first time in my life. Nobody had told me that this was the norm for snorkeling. One shouldn’t have to stand up on shallow reef mid-snorkeling to address fogs, ever. Until I had this experience, like countless new merrymakers all around Waikiki, I did not regard having to deal with fogging every 5 minutes as anything unusual.

Continue reading →

Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, Hawaii, Travel | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Waikiki & Honolulu landmarks seen from departing flight DL650

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

Delta 650 took off from runway 8R at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport due East at 5:15pm local time. Our pilot seemed to have made a point of banking the aircraft to trace the southern coast in the first 4 minutes of the flight to afford those seating on the left side a great aerial view of Sand Island, Honolulu downtown, Ala Moana, Waikiki, Kaimana, Diamond Head, Kahala, Hawaii Kai, Hanauma Bay, and Koko Head. Then the plane turned East again and flew towards the mainland.

Unlike the JFK arrival video I recorded, I was able to recognize all landmarks as I looked out of my window seat. This is largely due to my month-long research into Oahu before our trip to the island. But still, I figured I would write a post showing these famous Hawaiian landmarks. Here is the recorded video. Continue reading →

Posted in Flight Simulations, Hawaii, Photography, Planes, Real Planes, Travel | Leave a comment

Actual landing flight path of Delta 650 at JFK runway 22L

Posted on November 28, 2025 by Xinhai Dude 辛亥生

I’ve always chosen window seats on flights whenever I could. And I never grew tired of watching my plane take off and land. Possibly I am just fascinated with flying, whether it involves model airplanes, computer simulations, or actual planes. But with only a few exceptional landmarks, I could almost never identify in realtime what the plane was flying over. It amazes me that I can’t recognize locations that should be familiar to me where I’ve driven by countless number of times.

The truth is that aerial views often looks quite different from ground views. Even though I kept thinking that I could mentally reconstruct a god’s eye view of my neighborhood, every landing proved me wrong. And my last trip was no exception. As I the plane readied itself for landing, I looked out of the window and couldn’t tell where the plane was. I put my phone against the window pane for the first time, and recorded the entire landing path.

I played the clip backward at home, and fired up Google Maps with Globe View to rotate its map to match the window view of the terrain. Painstakingly I retraced the flight path backward from runway 22L. This turned out to be the quickest way to reconstruct the landing path. In doing so, I’ve joined a bunch of nerds like Joseph Gunn who document, among other thing, flight paths. In fact, I consulted one of his blog posts on flight patterns to confirm landing paths at runway 22L. Continue reading →

Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Flight Simulations, Hawaii, Planes, Real Planes, Travel | Leave a comment