Author's posts
Jun 19
How to Host a Tiki Party: Décor, Food, Drinks & Music
A great tiki party should feel like stepping through a doorway and briefly leaving the ordinary world behind. The lights become warmer and lower. Bamboo, tropical foliage, carved artwork, glowing lanterns, vintage-style prints, and unusual ceramics transform familiar surroundings. Exotica music plays in the background. The table fills with shareable appetizers and colorful food, while …
Jun 16
Hawaiian Kiʻi: Traditional Carved Images, History & Meaning
Tall wooden figures with powerful faces stand beside a reconstructed temple at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau on the island of Hawaiʻi. Their eyes stare outward, their mouths form dramatic expressions, and their carved bodies seem completely at home against the dark lava rock and blue Pacific. Visitors sometimes look at these figures and call them “tiki …
Jun 16
Tiki Coloring Page: A Polynesian Pop-Inspired Design
Looking for a fun tiki coloring page with plenty of bold lines, unusual details, and room to experiment with color? This playful design features a large tiki-inspired character surrounded by swirling tropical shapes, giving kids and adults plenty of opportunities to create their own colorful version. The figure has a wonderfully exaggerated face with large …
Jun 16
French Polynesia Travel Guide: Tahiti, Bora Bora, Moorea & Beyond
Few destinations have been imagined as intensely as French Polynesia. For generations, paintings, novels, travel posters, Hollywood movies, luxury resorts, and American tiki culture have presented these South Pacific islands as an almost mythical world of turquoise lagoons, volcanic mountains, coconut palms, white-sand beaches, and thatched bungalows hovering over impossibly clear water. The scenery really …
Jun 16
Polynesian Tattoo Traditions: History, Meaning & Cultural Respect
Bold black lines curve across a face. Dense geometric patterns cover a man’s body from waist to knee. Fine bands circle an arm. Repeated human figures, animals, triangles, and abstract forms create elaborate compositions across skin. These images are often grouped together online under a single label: Polynesian tattoos. But there has never been one …
Jun 16
Polynesian Islands Guide: Hawaiʻi, Tahiti, Sāmoa, Tonga & Beyond
Polynesia stretches across one of the largest cultural regions on Earth. Its islands are scattered over millions of square miles of the Pacific, separated by enormous distances yet connected through ancestry, language, voyaging, oral traditions, art, food, and relationships with the ocean. Hawaiʻi rises near the region’s northern edge. Aotearoa New Zealand forms its southwestern …
Jun 16
Polynesian Culture: History, Traditions, Art, Language & Daily Life
Polynesia is often reduced to a familiar collection of images: palm trees, canoes, flower lei, carved figures, tattoos, tropical beaches, and dancers moving to drums beneath a sunset. Every one of those images can connect with some part of Polynesian life. None comes close to explaining Polynesian culture as a whole. Across an enormous expanse …
Jun 01
Hawaiian Flowers: Beautiful Blooms, Meanings & Cultural Significance
Few places are as closely associated with flowers as Hawaiʻi. Brilliant hibiscus blooms, fragrant strands of pikake, colorful plumeria lei, and fiery red lehua blossoms have become inseparable from the visual identity of the Hawaiian Islands. Yet the story of Hawaiian flowers is much deeper than tropical beauty. Flowers and other plant materials appear in …
Jan 28
Birds of Hawaii: Native Species, Endemic Birds & Conservation
Hawaiʻi is famous for beaches, volcanoes, tropical flowers, and lush mountain forests, but some of the islands’ most extraordinary natural treasures have feathers. Millions of years of geographic isolation allowed birds arriving in the Hawaiian Islands to evolve independently from their relatives elsewhere. Over time, this produced an astonishing collection of species found nowhere else …
Jan 27
Tiki Boat Tours: What to Expect, What to Bring & Safety Tips
A tiki boat tour combines one of the simplest pleasures of vacation—being out on the water—with a playful tropical atmosphere. Picture a shaded boat, thatched-roof styling, island-inspired music, waterfront views, and a relaxed cruise where the journey is usually more important than the destination. Tiki boats have become popular in coastal towns, lake communities, and …
