Start from 30 curated places around Hilo, HI, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Moon and Turtle
A tiny, intimate restaurant on Kalakaua Street run by a Hilo-native kitchen whose daily-changing menu is built entirely on what's available from the Hilo Farmers Market and local fishermen that morning. The space seats under 30 people and the cooking has a precision that would be notable in any city. Reserve well ahead; this is the most sought-after table on the east side of the Big Island.
Suisan Fish Market
The definitive poke spot in Hilo — a fish market adjacent to the commercial fishing docks where the ahi and tuna are processed on-site at maximum freshness. The poke cases offer a dozen or more preparations including spicy ahi, classic shoyu, yuzu scallop, and garlic butter prawn, all sold by the cup at prices that make you wonder what you've been paying elsewhere.
Trails & outdoors
Kilauea Iki Trail
The best hike in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park — a 3.3-mile loop that descends 400 feet through native rainforest into the solidified lava lake of Kilauea Iki Crater, where you cross a full mile of black basalt that was molten lava in a 1959 eruption. Steam vents still hiss through cracks in the crater floor. The transition from lush ohia-lehua rainforest to alien moonscape happens in a single switchback.
Nahuku (Thurston Lava Tube) Trail
A 0.4-mile loop starting in a fern-draped forest that delivers you into a 500-year-old lava tube — 600 feet of tunnel formed when molten lava drained from beneath a solidified outer shell, leaving a tube large enough to walk upright through with headroom to spare. The forest on the approach is itself extraordinary; the lava tube is geological surrealism.
Things to do
Maunakea Visitor Information Station Stargazing
The Maunakea VIS at 9,200 feet offers free public stargazing every clear night using the clearest skies on Earth — Mauna Kea hosts the world's largest telescope array because the atmosphere above it is uniquely transparent. The program includes telescope viewing, constellation talks, and laser pointer tours of the night sky, and the altitude means the stars are vivid in a way that is physically different from sea-level viewing.
Panaewa Rainforest Zoo and Gardens
The only natural tropical rainforest zoo in the United States, free to enter, with 82 species of animals in a lush Puna rainforest setting where the enclosures are hidden in the vegetation rather than lined up in rows. White Bengal tigers, a pygmy hippo, giant tortoises, and native Hawaiian birds are the highlights, and the petting zoo on Saturday mornings turns it into a genuine family event.
Landmarks & sights
Rainbow Falls
An 80-foot waterfall on the Wailuku River two miles above downtown Hilo that generates rainbows in the morning mist rising from the pool below — a phenomenon consistent enough that it happens almost daily when the sun is right. The main viewpoint is a two-minute walk from the parking lot and is free; the upper trail above the falls leads through a forest of ancient banyan trees with a completely different perspective looking down into the gorge. The site is considered sacred in Hawaiian tradition as the home of the goddess Hina.
Hilo Farmers Market
Two hundred vendors on Wednesday and Saturday mornings at the corner of Kamehameha Avenue and Mamo Street — tropical fruit grown in the lush Hamakua and Puna districts, freshly made poke bowls, live music, local crafts, and the full spectrum of Big Island agricultural output. Huffington Post named it the best farmers market in the United States, and on a Saturday morning it functions as the social center of Hilo.