Trip to Hawaii

A Brief History. In 1899, James Dole, just 22 years old, moved to Honolulu from Massachusetts and purchased 64 acres of land in the central plains of Oahu. After trying several experimental crops, he settled on pineapple. This was the beginning of the pineapple empire. Dole created two canneries in Wahiawa and Honolulu Harbor and started advertising, resulting in nationwide consumer popularity. After bringing in automatic pineapple peelers, business boomed even greater. In 1950, a small fruit stand was created in Dole’s fields. A plantation-style home was erected in 1989 and turned into an archive and living museum, honoring the work and life of James Dole.

       

Today the Dole Plantation is mainly a very good tourist attraction. It features three main venues:

• It has a 20-minute train tour aboard the Pineapple Express that covers two miles. It travels through the greenery of the North Shore on a custom-made, vintage-style train and you listen to narration on James Dole, the agricultural history of the island and the Dole story. The narrative includes showcasing stages of pineapple and other tropical fruits from planting to harvest
• It has a nice garden that displays the tropiical vegetation of the island. The self-guided Plantation Garden Tour illuminates more than eight gardens diverse with coffee plants to cocoa pods.
• It has a Pineapple Garden Maze named by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest maze in 2008. Tropical plants – 14,000 of them – sprawl meticulously over three acres and two-and-a-half miles. There is a game you can play for time in finding eight markers within the maze.