The next time you're in Hawaii's tropical paradise, you'll have absolutely no excuses for not pushing the vacation envelope. With this concise, well-crafted guide tucked in your back pocket, you'll be considered armed and dangerous, and poised for a huge variety of radical island excursions. From scuba-diving explorations of Lanai's enchanting choral cathedrals to magic-mushroom excavation in West Maui's Hobbit Land, Extreme Hawaii outlines hundreds of intense and uniquely Hawaiian daily expeditions. The author's thorough and exhaustive research (he gets paid to do this?) is apparent as you thumb through the diverse assortment of sporting options and adventures. You'll be hip to the local surf spots, waterfall-diving opportunities, snorkeling locales, mountain-bike trails, white-water kayaking, and even snowboarding possibilities on top of Hawaii's tallest volcano, Mauna Kea on the Big Island. --Lance Judd
From Library Journal
Extreme adventures are individual sports and outdoor activities, like rock climbing, parasailing, mountain biking, skyboarding, disc golf, and snowboarding, that contain a certain degree of risk and excite an adrenaline rush. Olsen, author of World Stompers (see below), surveys extreme adventures in Northern California and Hawaii. Each adventure, organized by region or island, is rated on a scale measuring the risk factor and the adrenaline rush. Replete with practical advice?the best being to avoid any activity you have the slightest degree of uncertainty about?each section contains a selective list of guides, suppliers, and information sources. While these titles do offer coverage of less traditional activities, crude and unscaled maps, a trite writing style, and misspellings such as "El Captan" for "El Capitan" easily outweigh any contribution they make to travel literature. The main fault, however, lies in the permission suggested by rating restricted areas; Olsen rates the off-limits caves under the University of California at Santa Cruz, and he advises the adventurer to be discreet when venturing onto the closed Navy Beach on Mono Lake. Rules apparently do not apply to extreme adventurers. Not recommended.?David Schau, Kanawha Cty. P.L., Charleston, WV
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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