Travel OAHU HAWAII On A BUDGET | Blue Ocean

Hey guys what's up? What's up guys? We're Lost and Boundless and recently we spent three weeks traveling around the beautiful island of Oahu, Hawaii and what we realized while traveling is that it's beautiful but it can get crazy pricey. So luckily for you guys we've put together a complete guide on how to travel Oahu on a budget. This video contains all of the information we learned about traveling Oahu on a budget so we've broken it down into four categories accommodation, travel, food, and cheap activities and we're gonna toss all the time stamps for each section in the description below so you guys can refer back to it when you're planning your travels. All right category number one is accommodation. This can easily be the most expensive part of your trip so for us when we were planning this is number one what we looked at. We're gonna just assume that if you're here for like budget travel don't even look at hotels. We'll just skip ahead. We're gonna skip that section. So moving on to hostels. Hostels are usually a budget traveler's paradise. Unfortunately in Oahu the hostels can still be pretty dang pricey. Like when we were looking at hostels you can get a hostel for maybe $35 a night and that's a bunk in like an eight-person dorm room and that's about as cheap as you'll find it. We stayed in one uh which was like a private room which was more of a hotel and that was awesome. That was like $78 per night but we had our own washroom, wi-fi, and everything like that. And shout out to those pelton waffles. In the morning they were amazing. That lady probably made a hundred waffles from like 8 a.m to 9 a.m. Just cranking them out. Realistic option number two would be airbnb. There's a ton of airbnbs. When we were searching around we found airbnbs for around cheapest $50 to $60 USD a night. So still fairly pricey but if you're splitting that between like three or four people you can break it down and get a pretty cheap airbnb. You're looking at something like maybe $15 per person a night which is incredible. It is a good option though because you usually have a kitchen so you can cut down on the food costs a lot. The only problem we find with airbnbs is that depending on where they are they can be in a little inconvenient places if you don't have a rental car or anything like that. So unless you have a rental car which we'll talk about a little bit later it might be harder to get to those places. There's a lot of bugs here. We chose a very bad spot to film. Camping is going to be your cheapest form of accommodation by far so it's a great way to cut down on your Hawaiian trip and you get to sleep on a beautiful beach, white sand, beautiful blue water, palm trees, the whole shebang for a really affordable price. Also there's pretty much campsites all across the island. You don't have to drive very far in between campsites so whatever town or part of the island you want to be on you'll be able to find a campsite there. On Oahu there are three types of campsites that you will find. There's the county campsites, state campsites, and then there's private campsites as well. County campsites are going to be your cheapest by far. Usually they have a flat rate for either a three night or a five night stay. For a three night you're going to find around $32 USD. For five nights you're going to find $52 USD. That's per campsite so it's a super super cheap way to camp. Really affordable. And unfortunately they only run from Friday to Monday or Friday to the next Wednesday so you either have to purchase a three night or a five night pass depending on the campground. The second option is state parks and because they're a little bit more pricey they tend to be a little bit safer and they're also not usually on the beaches. You'll find those for about $18 USD per night per campground up to six people and then it's $3 USD more per person per night. So still really affordable. Still super super affordable and you're usually in a pretty cool location as well with those. Your third option is the private campsites. There's one that's really well known and has great reviews on the northeastern side of Oahu. I'm going to butcher the name. It's Malakahana Beach Campground and that runs for about $9.50 USD per person per night. So it's a little bit more expensive than the state campgrounds but you do get the added bonus that it is a gated campground which adds that extra layer of safety and they usually have staff 24-7 from what we could tell. Beware though because it is gated it closes at 7 p.m. so it's a bit unfortunate if you want to do sunset things or you know go out for a later dinner you won't be able to get in unless you're in before 7 p.m. I'd just like to mention that there are some cons to camping in Hawaii. The first one being if you don't have camping equipment that's another cost that you'd have to add on. There are places that you can rent camping equipment from for about I think it's like $20 a day but the other issue that we ran into a lot in Oahu is that there's a bit of a mixed opinion of camping and in terms of the safety. There is unfortunately a fairly large homeless population on Oahu and so a lot of the campsites are known to be a bit of a homeless refuge. So unfortunately there are some safety issues in terms of petty theft and break-ins and stuff like that. So if you have valuables you'll just want to be mindful of that and do your research of specific campsites before you decide to camp there. One thing I do want to say just to help paint a picture is that in Hawaii no beach can be privatized. So all beaches are public which means the homeless population are allowed to be there so you will find that people can come and go within a campsite via a beach access because that can't be gated off. In our experience being in Hawaii we never really had any issues with any locals or anyone. Everyone was really nice. So don't rule out camping just because of safety, just do your research beforehand. All right last our last accommodation. Our favorite accommodation. Our favorite option is the quote free option and there's a bunch of ways that you can kind of stay in Hawaii for free. The one that we decided to use was work away but you can also do woofing, you can couch surf, you can house sit, you can do it. We have friends who did a house exchange in Hawaii. There's all sorts of options that you can use to reduce your costs almost entirely. We did a work away and we loved it. We stayed for three weeks in Kailua on the windward or eastern side of Hawaii. Basically it was a work exchange. We would work around 25 hours a week volunteering helping them preserve this conservation area right by their house and in exchange we would get free accommodation and free food as well. So that reduced the cost to almost nothing. The only thing we were paying for is when we were bussing around or going out to eat. For workaways and woofing I would say those are best left for vacations where you have a little bit longer of a time because some of your hours are spent volunteering which we loved because you're really getting out. For us we were getting out in native bush and really getting to know local flora and fauna so that was awesome. But it will cut into some of your beach time so if you do have a limited time house sitting might be a better option for you or a house exchange. That way all your time is free time. Now that accommodation's out of the way let's get into category two which is travel. How are you gonna make it around the island? It's a small island but you still gotta get places. You still gotta get places. Renting a car on Hawaii is actually fairly affordable considering how expensive everything else is. It's around $40 a day and it does offer you the most flexibility. You can make your own itinerary, stop where you want, all the good stuff that a car allows. Some of the downsides are though is that gas is pretty expensive on the island. Like it was we never saw any gas cheaper than three dollars per gallon. Yeah definitely expensive for the U.S. It's also not the cheapest option if you are a budget savvy traveler so we'll get into some of the more budget-friendly ones. There is an alternative to renting a car that can be slightly cheaper and it's called Turo. We had never heard of this until we came to Hawaii. It's essentially the Airbnb of car rental so you're renting someone's car privately and you can book it through their website and everything. We found one for we rented it for three days. Each day was I think $25 American which was significantly cheaper than the rental car options we are seeing. The only downside is that unfortunately not all credit cards or most credit cards won't actually cover car insurance for Turo. I'm not exactly sure why but Turo luckily does offer like a gradient to their car insurance where you can get different levels and the basic option is like five dollars a day and the most you know full coverage one is I think like 11 or 12 bucks a day so it's not even then it's still not quite as expensive as like car insurance for a rental car it's just unfortunate your credit card won't cover it. Another con with Turo is unless you want to add the additional pay to clean you are responsible for cleaning your car at the end of the stay which when you're in the beach and the sand and the water. Sand gets everywhere. It gets everywhere so you do have to set aside you know maybe 30 minutes of time to give it a little zhuzh. Just saran wrap everything as soon as we did we put towels on all of our seats and just made sure that we minimize the sand. Even though renting a car can be pricey and there's a lot to think about as far as what insurance to get and all that kind of stuff we do recommend renting a car for like at least two days because it is by far the quickest way to see the island and there's so many little pit stops especially if you're driving up the Kamehameha highway to the north shore there's a bunch of little places you'll want to stop and when you're on the bus it's kind of hard to justify because you have to think to yourself do I want to be here for 45 minutes to wait for the next bus or should we skip it so we highly recommend renting a car for at least two days while you're in Hawaii if not more. Your third option is taking the bus it's pretty cheap you can get a full day pass for around 550 USD. The problem that we ran into though is if you're like a backpacker and you have your giant home on your back they actually don't let you carry those on the buses we're not exactly sure why. We heard that from locals we never saw anyone on the bus with those big backpacks so that is a downside so we'd recommend only using a bus for like day trips when you're going out to see different towns and stuff like that but keep your big backpack in your hostel or wherever you're staying. Another downside of the bus is that it definitely runs on island time. Some of the buses we were catching they were like 45 minutes between the next bus which isn't a huge deal if you plan your day really well we are not good at planning so we found this out the hard way and we were definitely reading a lot of ebooks at bus stops waiting for the bus to come but it is a pretty good option because when you get the day pass it's usable across the entire island so you can use it to travel from Waikiki to pretty much anywhere on the island just note that it takes a little bit longer. Especially if you're coming from Waikiki buses are a lot more frequent and they head back to Waikiki because that's where most people are but us staying in Kailua not as many people busing in that direction so we definitely had to wait a little bit longer. I realized that we did not mention hitchhiking as an option for traveling around Oahu. After some quick research it seems that it is technically legal but there are some strict rules about like where you can hitchhike. We personally didn't hitchhike and we didn't really see anyone hitchhiking but I know that like the aloha culture is you know very very real on the island and I'm sure nice locals would be glad to pick you up. We just personally don't know the intricacies of the laws around them because they have changed over time so just check it out before you plan on hitchhiking. Lastly we have a couple more random tips that didn't really fit into any one particular category but were important to note for travel. When you fly into Honolulu you might be looking for like a ride to your hostel or wherever you're staying for your first night and it's worth noting that there is a $15 shuttle service that you can use from Honolulu to Waikiki. That's how we got to our hostel the first night and normally you book it ahead of time but we were not planned or we did not plan and we just scooted on one. Yeah luckily they were super nice and they let us just like pay for it right then and there and then we hopped on it. So we mentioned before that gas is really expensive in Hawaii but there is a little hack that we learned and that is to bring your Costco card or if you're not a Costco member become one. It's like super cheap annual fee to become one and the gas was like 40 to 50 cents cheaper per gallon. Easily the cheapest gas on the island so that's a good way to save some money if you are renting a car. Category three which is probably our favorite category is food. Yes food is important to us wherever we are. It's one thing that although we like to do cheaply we probably spend a lot of our money here. Also we like to hike but I'm getting more and more convinced that we like to hike so that we can eat more food. That is correct. One of the cheapest ways to fill your belly on the island is Costco. I mean it's cheapest at home too. Let's be real the Costco food court it like hands down. You can get like a giant I think it's like a quarter pound hot dog it's like one of those footlongs for like a dollar fifty. With a drink. With a drink like it it's not good for you we're not condoning it as far as a healthy option but if you need a quick bite it is amazing and even if you just want a snack walk through grab a bunch of delicious samples and then just walk out that's more than we would like to admit. Yeah another one of our favorites was Foodland. We actually had a local recommend Foodland to us and they let us know that it has the best poke on the island. Not only in like taste it tasted super fresh and tons of flavors but also taste versus price. For six dollars you can get either a poke bowl or I like just the raw fish. This is the bowl of the raw fish which you can get for six dollars. That's incredible and it's like like Alana said that the trade-off of price is amazing. Another awesome thing as far as price versus you know deliciousness in my opinion debatable is the spam musubi. So if you watched any of our vlogs you saw this but basically it's kind of like sushi meets American spam. You have like a block of rice with spam on it and then seaweed wrapped around it. It's delicious. They're usually only like two dollars so it's a good like grab and go snack. And you will learn Hawaiians love spam. They do. They love it. Another option is checking out a local farmer's market where we were staying in Kailua. There was one on Thursday nights and one on Sunday mornings and it was the best place to try local cuisine, fresh food, and get a little bit of that community feel the aloha spirit. We met some awesome people there and even met the person who gave us the six dollar foodland poke tip. Many a breakfast poke bowl happened because of that beautiful man. And lunch and dinner. No shame at all. And our final tip for food is to just and this is just the millennial in me I guess just google it. Just google like cheap food around you and when we did that uh Yelp was super helpful because we ended up finding this udon place. I think it's like Merukume udon. It like smacked down in the center of Honolulu and they had udon bowls for like six dollars. We went there when it was like raining and cold one day. Cold for Hawaii standards. And we just warmed up with like a beautiful brothy bowl of udon. So definitely check out Yelp and Google. They are invaluable when it comes to finding cheap eats. Drum roll. Category four is cheap activities. What are you gonna do on the island? How are you gonna have fun? What are you gonna fill the time in between eating poke bowls with? That's true. That's sadly accurate. Luckily on Oahu you can find so many cheap activities that you can still see pretty much all of the island except maybe from like above on one of those helicopter tours for free or like very very cheap. There's a ton of stuff to do. So what we did on our very first day after we landed in Oahu was we went to ABC in Waikiki which they're everywhere and we bought a cheap snorkel set and that was amazing because there are so many awesome beaches that you want to be able to snorkel at and you don't have to rent one every single day. It's nice to just be able to throw in your rental car or your turbo car and you know have the flexibility. Some of our favorite beaches to snorkel at on the west coast is Electric Bay. This one is slightly more advanced in the winter just because the waves are higher and you have to swim out farther. But if you're a good swimmer or an advanced snorkeler definitely check that one out. Lots of people see turtles there. On the north shore is Shark's Cove. That one's cool because there's a big rock wall that breaks the surf so you can snorkel there any time of year. On the east shore is Lanikai Beach. This was my first snorkel spot and I think it was my favorite for like the intro to snorkeling. It's a very very good beginner beach. Alana for the record used to be afraid of fish underwater and I took her to Lanikai Beach, taught her how to and that fear's mostly gone. Mostly gone. Yeah it's great because there's lots of sandy patches in between the coral so if you're having like a little panic moment like oh my god there's a lot of fish around me right now you can stand up and like run back to the beach. Maybe not everyone has that problem. And the last is on the south side and it's the most famous place to snorkel is Hanamo Bay. It's known for its amazing marine life. We saw we didn't see a whale like underwater but we saw a whale in the bay. There's turtles there. There's so many kinds of fish. It does have a small entrance fee but I would say it's very much worth it. Yeah it's only like $7.50 to get in so if you can make the day trip there we highly suggest it because you will see a lot of cool marine life. The second cheap activity or free in this case and it's pretty much the reason why we came to Oahu is the hiking. The hiking in Hawaii is absolutely jaw-dropping. It's so beautiful. You can hike up all those beautiful green ridges that you see in all the pictures. You can hike to waterfalls. Some of them you can swim in. It's just beautiful. Some of the hikes that we would strongly recommend doing if you're on Oahu are Olamena Ridge or the Three Peaks hike. Lulumahu Falls was an amazing waterfall to see. Mauna Wili Falls if you want to actually swim in the waterfall and then we also did Diamond Head at sunrise which was beautiful. There's so many options. Yeah Wiliwili Nui was another one of our favorites. Incredible views of Honolulu and very close to Waikiki so that's good. And if you want to see any of these hikes we actually vlogged all of them so feel free to check out the link in the description for more of those hikes if you want to see more details but definitely definitely recommend hiking on Hawaii. At least do like one hike while you're here bare minimum because all of them you can't go wrong. They're beautiful. We loved heading to the north shore. That's where the incredible surf is. There's huge waves there like they can get up to 50 feet and when they get that big they actually hold the eddy competition which you should google and look at pictures because it's crazy. Insane. It's awesome but highly recommend doing a drive along the north shore especially if you rented a car because there's so many little scenic stop offs. Yeah there's like Kualoa Ranch, Chinaman's Hat, like you can check out all the little snorkeling bays, Pipeline Beach, Haleiwa which is like an adorable town. You can go get food from the shrimp trucks everything like that so definitely recommend heading to the north shore. There's so many little pockets of amazing things there. If you rented a car another option is to hit up one of the scenic drives. One of our favorites was the Ho'omahulia Botanical Gardens. Hopefully I didn't butcher that again. It's a beautiful garden that you can drive through. There's this one spot that has had so many Instagram pictures that they have now banned pictures. That's how gorgeous it is and it's totally free so definitely check that out. That's a great budget-friendly option. One of the do things on Hawaii is checking out Pearl Harbor. There's so much history there and there are free tours so highly recommend you know sitting aside 45 minutes of your day and doing the tour getting to see and experience that history that's kind of shaped Hawaii to how it is now. And finally if you happen to be in Honolulu on a Friday night head down to the Hilton Hotel because on the beach they have a free fireworks show. I believe it starts at like quarter to eight at night and you can get like right up close to the fireworks. It was a beautiful show and totally free which is amazing. Alright guys well that just about wraps it up for our complete budget guide of Oahu. I hope you guys find some of this information useful in your planning. If you guys have any other tips on like activities or cheap places to eat or any of what we mentioned leave a comment for us down below because we would like to know and I'm sure there's other people watching this video who would love to know. Yeah and if you have any questions leave them in the comments we are happy to answer anything that you know might come up as you're planning your trip. And if you enjoyed this kind of video we're going to be making some more videos like this in the future as we travel around and also as we travel we are making vlogs of our journeys so feel free to subscribe to see more of that and we will catch you guys in the next video. Thanks for watching guys! Later guys! And now I'm going to give you the real insider tip. On the way to the fireworks show you're going to pass one of these several locations of Honolulu Cookies. I'm just saying if you walk in there there are free samples. That's it. I'll leave that there. Just leave that there. Do that what you will.