A Royal Palace, a Tower, and Chinatown: Downtown Honolulu with Kids

We spent Saturday walking around downtown Honolulu. One of the best things about being in Hawaii for five weeks is that we can take it easy, and see the sights slowly.

The kids went to the pool in the morning, and I took a sunrise walk along the beach. We didn’t feel the urge to spend the whole day at the beach, and decided to check out the downtown area in the afternoon.

We took the Number 1 Bus that takes us straight downtown. We got off the bus just a couple of blocks from Iolani Palace, the last official residence of Hawaii’s monarchy. The opulent palace was built in 1882 by King Kalākaua. His sister and successor, Queen Lili‘uokalani, lived there while she reigned.

My children, however, were not particularly interested in seeing the palace, or learning much about the history. Thus, we decided to not pay the admission fee, and simply to enjoy the palace grounds. The kids were delighted to find that there were scores of pigeons as well as other birds and began to feed the birds. One of the great things about traveling is that you often can find the same things to do around the world. For my children, feeding pigeons is one of their favorite universal pastimes. They also like catching pigeons. I know this is not the most sanitary of habits, but we figure so long as they wash their hands thoroughly afterwards they should be okay.

After pigeon-catching at the palace, we made our way to Aloha Tower, which has the oldest elevator in Hawai’i. The views from the Tower were fairly interesting, but not incredibly breathtaking. We did spot a gigantic rainbow, which was pretty awesome.

After Aloha Tower, we decided to go to Chinatown for lunch. By that point, the kids were very hungry. I looked up a restaurant on Yelp and was pleased to find a restaurant with five stars and 80 reviews. However, when we got there, it was out of business. We found another restaurant nearby and looked all over for it. There was no sign of it either. Lesson learned: Yelp is not a reliable method for finding restaurants in Chinatown in Honolulu. By that point, the kids were whining loudly, so we went into the first restaurant we could find.


The food was decent, but nothing spectacular. The Kung Pao Chicken was actually pretty good. The lo mein was a bit weird. The garlic pepper chicken and beef broccoli were nothing special. If we didn’t have the kids with us, we might have gotten the seafood special – a four-person meal for $52, but decided against it. That might have been better than what we got.

After all of that walking around and eating, we were pretty tired. We walked back over to the Number 1 bus stop and rode back to Kahala.

I took one last walk down to the beach to watch the sunset. Then, I came home and slept deeply. It felt great to be physically, but not mentally exhausted. Another fantastic day in Honolulu.