HIKING, SNORKELING & SHOPPING!

Walking down the steep hill to Hanauma Bay!

People snorkeling by the reef!

Hanauma Bay Beach

It was a beautiful sunny day!

Some of us trying out our snorkel gear! 

At Bubba Gump Shrimp!

Celebrating Evan (from Norway) and Daniella's (From Colombia)  birthdays at Bubba Gump Shrimp!

We woke up this morning and enjoyed our breakfast, especially the oatmeal and sweet pineapple. Some of us even have belgian waffles with whipped cream, syrup and strawberries everyday. After breakfast we split into two groups, one went snorkeling at Hanuma Bay and the other hiked Diamond Head. 

The snorkling group split up into pairs when we entered the State Park and watched a short but cheesy video about keeping the coral reef safe.  Then we started to walk down the hill to the beach and noticed the beautiful, blue water and amazing view.  Once we put our towels down we put on all of our funny snorkling gear, took plenty of silly pictures and jumped into the sea. Initially we were nervous about hitting the coral because it was quite sharp and the water was so shallow.  However, we were able to tropical fish of many shapes, sizes and colors.  Some people even got to swim with huge sea turtles! After snorkeling we enjoyed sunbathing on the beach and tried not together burnt.....for some of us that didn't go very well.  Snorkeling was a true Hawaiian experience and we thought it was awesome.  

Meanwhile, the hikers left the hotel heading towards Diamond Head, which is an extinct volcano.  On the way we stopped to do some stretching and counted in many different languages like Portuguese, Italian, German and Finnish.  When we arrived at the park entrance, some of the students decided to try to beat the record time for making it up the mountain which was set on the last Belo USA trip.  The time to beat was 13 minutes.  They ran up the crater at record speed and made it up in 10 minutes and 45 seconds! The rest of us joined them after climbing 265 steps. The view from the top was incredible and before climbing back down we took a group photo over looking Waikiki beach.  When we got to the bottom we had time to buy delicious shaved ice and luckily there was a bus waiting for us to take us back to the hotel. 

During the afternoon we had time to go to Waikiki beach, get lunch or relax at the pool.  Then we all boarded the buses and went to Ala Moana mall for some shopping! The mall was gigantic and there were way too many stores to visit before dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant. A lot of people had seafood for dinner, but the really fun part was answering questions to the Forrest Gump quiz. We also got to sing happy birthday to Even and Daniella. It was a fun way to end the evening. 

Sunniva from Norway

Joao Marcos from Brazi