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Thank you, John!  You should make posters/postcards of this.  It would be a sell-out. This is the thing:  I don't think we realized just how negatively our lives had been impacted by tourism.  Over the last few decades, we became acclimated to having our home overtaken by ever-increasing numbers of visitors.  We were rolling out the welcome mat because that was the aloha spirit for which Hawaii is so famous.  The easy tourist dollar became our addiction.  Then the global pandemic happened and they were gone from our beaches, parks and lives.  Our natural resources were given the chance to recover and once again thrive.  It was Hawaii-for-locals-only. Now that they have returned,  especially with the crush of spring break tourists, we are overwhelmed to be back at this place we left a year ago.   It is not a happy return to normalcy.  More like a necessary evil.

ahhnow · 3 years ago

I guess all the visitors over the last few weeks come from states with no covid restrictions. It's total chaos trying to enforce 6 ft. distance, mask wearing, limited capacity restrictions at the restaurant I work at (Front St., Lahaina). It's going to be a very long summer enforcing these rules on people who want to pretend the pandemic is over.

Lee1011 · 3 years ago

Great! Straight out of "Poltergeist II." A reasonable number of tourists should be as welcome here as anywhere else. However, in places like Venice and Amsterdam and Barcelona and Hawai`i the numbers have become so extreme, and so destructive of the environment and of everyday life for residents, that tourists have become like locusts. Those other cities I mentioned, and additional ones around the world, have been moving aggressively in recent years to put caps on tourist numbers, on B&Bs in residential areas, and much more. We urgently need to do the same. One simple way to measure how bad things are is to use Haunama Bay as a trigger warning. Before Covid--for decades--that pristine supposed "nature preserve" had become a tourist-polluted mess, the water murky with suntan residue, the coral crumbling, the colorful fish long gone. During the pandemic nature went to work and recovery was underway. See what happens in the coming year as the locusts return. A tourism playground is not what these beautiful islands were meant to be.

OldManRiver · 3 years ago