Fairly soon on your drive out of Hawaiian Beaches after passing Honolulu Landing (see the last picture) you come to evergreen treed Nanawale County Park.

Within the park are the sandhills which are remnants of the May 1840 eruption that destroyed the village of Nanawale here.

The sandhills are a visible landmark from the sea. If you visit Hawaiian Beaches and do not intend to drive all the way to Kapoho, this is a nice spot to turn around.

As evidenced by the slide area, these sandhills nowadays mostly provide entertainment for kikis (kids).

If you are on one end of the summit of a sandhill and look at it in profile on up the coast, you will notice a gentle curving of the hill. Although I must acknowledge the possiblity that this is the result of more than a hundred years of shaping by the elements, I have benefit of the history of the US Geological Survey for 1882-3 describing these hills as "cones".

Due to considerable wind and sea erosion and the great subsidence from the earthquakes of 1924, these hills are just a fraction of what they were a hundred years ago.

A beach near South Point on this island is renown as Green Sand Beach. Most people think that that is the only green sand around. But these hills are green sand too, although not with the same density of green crystals in the exploded predominant black lava sand.

Here is a closeup picture of a rock with green crystals in it. Rocks such as these flowed up as magma once upon a time. They exploded on contact with the water and have been pounded by the sea to form sand with a little green in it.

Looking back in the other direction from the top of the northern sandhill you can see the park access here allows you to drive right in here (carefully) and up to the sandhill.

I have never seen anyone here to interrupt my serenity when I have visited. However, it must be a popular place at times as evidenced by the litter around the sandhills.

There is a very nice cool wooded area here that is not a jungle. Camping is allowed but there are NO facilities and no water.

A short distance south on Beach Road out of Hawaiian Beaches subdivision you will find this remnant of a 1920's storage shed as the only marker of the old Honolulu Landing. This was then the end of the government road and the way south from here was a mere trail.

Honolulu means protected bay and only two other places in the state (on other islands) bear the name (there is one on Maui). Prior to 1924 this was a shipping embarking location with small boats loading ships anchored further out. However, in 1924 great earthquakes resultant from the Kilauea explosion caused the shoreline to subside and the bay disappeared.