Hawaii's Main Shopping Street: Kalakaua Ave in Waikiki

a walking tour of waikiki's business district i'm chris this is the traveling princess and in this video we're going to walk you down waikiki's main business street and i'm going to turn the camera around so you can see where i'm walking instead of looking at me the whole time we are starting this walk in front of the hyatt regency hotel and this is right across the street from kuhio beach park and the westin moana surf rider if you want to see what's going on at the beach i've got a whole walking tour of the beach from a couple years ago the beach hasn't changed all that much except maybe there's a little less sand right now but i really want to take you down the business district street so you can see how things have changed due to the pandemic i am recording this video on june 9th which is a wednesday and you'll see this in just a couple days from now now one of the big differences visiting waikiki right now walking down this main street is there are while there's still a lot of people here there's a lot less than there used to be in particular there's a lot less japanese tourists and although hawaii is open to tourists from japan japanese stock to quarantine for 14 days when they go back to japan so there aren't many japanese tourists so you won't see any of the waikiki draw trolleys the oly oli buses and the stores that you see on the right and the left almost all of them have shortened their hours like if we take a look in the ugg store right here you'll see that the ugg store has these really short hours in fact on wednesday and thursday today they are closed that's fairly typical as to what you're going to see now on the left this is the westin moana surfrider hotel this is one of the original hotels in waikiki actually not one of it is the original hotel in waikiki in particular the moana hotel which is kind of the old classic colonial looking hotel it was then joined to this ugly looking hotel that i'll call the surf rider to make a single complex now if you're looking for a japanese convenience store there's a location of lawson station right there this is a small one there's actually two in waikiki and i'll have a video coming out later to take you on a walk through of the larger lawson station in the sheraton which i think is the best japanese convenience store in the usa and now the sheraton that i mentioned it's the big sheraton on the ocean not to be confused with the sheraton princess hotel right here this one is a little lower in sheraton but interestingly enough if you are staying at the western moana surf rider right here because it's ocean front it was built a long time ago they didn't really plan for parking and so their parking garage for the westin is actually across the street at the sheraton now many of the intersections including this one in waikiki are kind of scramble crossings so all the traffic stops and then everybody crosses so that's what we just did right there and one of the things that there used to be a lot of in waikiki are these little news racks that had like coupons and japanese magazines you can see they're really empty right now they haven't been producing all the tourist magazines just due to the lack of tourists here taxi cabs have come back in full force we see a limousine right here some of the street vendors are back we'll see the carts as well and uh the croc store is open here in front of the sheraton also the last few years maybe a couple years a lot of years uh honolulu oahu's rolled out these bicky bikes they are kind of their metropolitan bike system you can rent them uh by the hour and just return them to one of these racks they do not have the bikes that you can just drop off anywhere but they do have some of the scooters these electric scooters that i've seen people ride that i've nearly gotten run over by in this building of the western moana surf rider this is their tall new newest building there used to be a location of ramoa luggage suitcases here it has moved a little further down the way into the royal hawaiian center next to the western monster fighter hotel is the outrigger waikiki if you are looking for dukes hawaii the most kind of party atmosphere for a restaurant you can check out the outrigger waikiki great evening live entertainment there dinner drinks will take a while now this is the first abc store that i'm pointing out but the abc stores in waikiki have everything a tourist would ever need right there and these are these uh one dollar electric scooters that i talked about that i i nearly got run over by earlier on the right hand side this is the international marketplace shopping mall this uh used to be kind of like a swap meet type thing with a lot of vendors now it's a big upscale shopping mall it's pretty neat to check out in the back there's a japanese supermarket uh mitsuha there's also some good coffee good restaurants in there check that out that seems to be going pretty strong most of those place seems to be doing their regular hours now on the back side of the international marketplace one block further down kuhio is a new location of ice monster it's a taiwanese shave ice chain i think it's the japanese version if you're looking for some taiwanese shave ice instead of uh hawaiian shave ice you can check that out here now on the right this is the maui brewing company it just looks well shut there's a lot of things on this main street that are just shut and look like they haven't been open for a year on the left hand side is the royal hawaiian shopping center i think this is the coolest shopping center in lake and it's right behind it is the royal hawaiian hotel it's that tower with the pink balconies there's a location of cheesecake factory popular with the tourists oh i want to show you macy's and show you just how closed this place is uh there they close these doors with some chains and they don't open until noon so uh they're currently opening at noon and closing until 8 pm we've got a couple of friendly police officers coming down here on their atvs keeping the peace i think with the pandemic at nighttime in particular when everything's closed and there's less tourists things get slightly weird with kind of weird people i've seen a bit more of the population who just kind of lives on the beach and lives around here more so than any other trip or visit that i've been on now in this royal hawaiian center on the left you can see the apple store in waikiki so if you need to get any of your apple stuff fixed you can do it right there if you're looking for dim sum there's a great dim sum place in the royal hawaiian center known as tim hawan and there's also a pretty good food court in the central building on the right hand side we've got a few more shops there's a rip curl surf shop there's coco cove which is a another convenience store there are a lot of convenience stores here and then the ramoa store that i mentioned earlier moved in just right there now what used to be kind of remnants of the international marketplace has moved down some of these lanes there's this alley here that says duke's marketplace 50 vendors back down that little uh hallway on the right we just passed a lululemon now i should point out that if you're looking at people walking down here say some people wearing masks some people aren't uh a couple weeks ago in hawaii they announced that you don't need to wear masks outside so masks are no longer required outside though they are required inside though many people are still choosing to wear them outside this is a delivery van for eskimo candy which is a kind of fish shop i just thought that's a really interesting painting or mermaid or something like that on there now here we have another one of waikiki's scramble crossings this is i would call this the center of the royal hawaiian shopping center there's a popular coffee shop up there called island vintage coffee they often do hula lessons and hula shows back there though i haven't seen any of those currently running due to the pandemic and uh now those electric scooters that i mentioned they're signs that say no bicycling skateboarding roller skating on the sidewalk which would include those electric scooters that we've nearly gotten run over by but i think people find those just that's a just a convenient place to ride them all right we'll go ahead and cross the street now oh if you're looking for mitsubi uh just down this street to the right of kind of that central part of the royal hawaiian center is a misubi cafe that makes pretty good mizubi's if you're looking for something cheap quick and fast you can check that out well you're probably finding the misubi's cheaper at 711 or something but cheap for waikiki on the right we have the waikiki shopping plaza this place is super dead in particular the japanese food hall right here which is usually down there it's just shut doesn't look like it's opened in a while this is where they used to do fire knife dances in there we haven't seen that the honolulu cookie company doesn't open till 11 a.m when we walked around here last night some of the honolulu cooking companies also closed really early now in just a week or two from now so actually now a few days from now on june 15th they've announced that inter-island travel in hawaii will no longer require a quarantine or covid19 test so if you're coming to hawaii you will just have to get the first kobit 19 negative test to get to the islands and then you can travel around the islands without getting any kobit 19 tests now i want to point out that over here the royal hawaiian center it's like three different buildings that are connected to each other and if you go on the second or third floor they cross over the streets and so you don't have to wait for the stop lights if you're up on that second or third floor and then behind the royal hawaiian center the high rise you see over there on the left that's the sheraton hotel that has the lawson station the best japanese convenience store looking down this street over here this is a big duty-free shop that takes up like nearly this whole block the duty free shop is shut and closed that was also a big kind of transit spot for the waikiki trolley where the waikiki trolley would stop and uh let up people we're gonna go ahead and cross the scramble now diagonally because we can you know in the u.s there aren't a lot of these scrambled crossings the term scramble crossing comes from uh tokyo where they have the famous scramble crossing in shibuya these crossings there's not a lot of great places to see them from the sky uh but now we're walking right here alongside the royal hawaiian center which takes up those three blocks at night time these torches are on which gives it a cool kind of vibe but uh the torches in the other part of waikiki beach in front of the hyatt and the marriott they have not turned those on yet and a couple tall buildings you see back there that's the uh ritz carlton residences one of the kind of newest developments in waikiki on the left we've got some upscale shops we've got tiffany they are cleaning the tiffany sign because everything by the beach gets dirty very quickly if it's not cleaned continuously there's a very large fire truck my color fire trucks here are yellow and this one is one of those uh things that actually has the guy who drives in the back because it's so long they need these ladder trucks to go up all the high-rise buildings now this street lures street has kind of one of the neatest other vibe shopping centers just down it um and that'll get you to the beach if you go that way and by the way looking up at that ritz carlton residence i just i love the shape of that building it has kind of like it's like got more stuff on the top than it does on the bottom that's interesting oh that shopping center i mentioned to the left is called waikiki beach walk and now this section of uh the main street has a lot of smaller stores there are a lot of souvenir shops there are a lot more local stores a lot of these on the right and left have just gone out of business there's also a lot of big luxury stores that were just further up a block or two and those are gone as well there's a fire truck going by and so i'm just gonna let you listen to that for a moment and come back after the fire truck comes by and and if you're in need of a pharmacy there's a location of long's drugs right here this is a two-story one this is the one i stop at if i eat any drugs oh there's a fountain that i need to turn my lens away from and coming up right here on the left on this intersection we have a hard rock cafe hard rock cafe was open but there's a few other restaurants that are on this little corner that just aren't open in particular we were looking forward to trying out bills on this trip which is a australian kind of like breakfast or pancake chain but no bills for us and that is going to bring us to the end of this walk oh i'm real really dark let me go this way the end of this walk because we have reached our lunch spot tonkatsu ginza byron just down this street we have an 11 o'clock reservation it's in like three minutes so we better get going if you want to see all about that katsu that we love well you'll see a video for that coming up if you want to see more videos about hawaii you can click right here for our entire hawaii playlist as usual we won't say goodbye because we'll see you in that video

Channel: Yellow Productions

Views: 15,966

Rating: 4.933444 out of 5

Keywords: Yellow Productions, waikiki beach, kalakaua ave, waikiki hawaii, hawaii travel, waikiki now, kalakaua avenue street view, honolulu hawaii, walk hawaii

Id: ZQfNQLNVCKc

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021