Honolulu: Pearl Harbor and Diamond Head

Capital of Hawai'i and the only city with a royal palace on American soil, Honolulu holds together the memory of an attack that changed twentieth-century history and the beaches that made Oahu synonymous with tropical vacation.

Pearl Harbor requires a car or bus transfer from downtown; the rest of the sites are reachable on foot from Waikiki.

The USS Arizona Memorial, a white structure suspended over the wreckage of the battleship sunk on December 7, 1941, still shows traces of fuel rising slowly to the surface more than eighty years after the attack.

The Iolani Palace, the only official royal palace on American soil, was the residence of Hawaii's last monarchs before Queen Lili'uokalani's deposition in 1893 and preserves original family royal furnishings.

The climb up Diamond Head, an extinct volcanic crater dominating the southeastern coast of Oahu, takes about ninety minutes round trip along a trail originally built for military purposes in the early 1900s.

The beach of Waikiki, less than two kilometers of sand that became a worldwide synonym for Hawaiian vacation, remains the point where long-board surfing was reintroduced to the Western public in the early 1900s.

The fuel still rising from the wreck of the USS Arizona makes Pearl Harbor one of the rare places where history is not entirely past, literally.

Waikiki, just kilometers away, shows instead an island that has chosen to look forward — while never forgetting what happened on that same shore.