Kualoa Ranch Movie And ATV Tour

I One of the places we've heard about on the island over and over again is "the ranch".  There are multiple ranches across the island, but Kualoa Ranch is the biggest on Oahu and most well known.  While they still function as a cattle ranch, they have diversified into other areas of agriculture as well as tourism and entertainment.  Many movies and TV shows have been filmed here (Jurassic Park, 50 First Dates, Pearl Harbor, Lost, Hawaii Five-O) with more happening every month.  Even while filming, there are group tours on buses, ATVs (All-terrain vehicles), and horseback.  Everyone always talks about how the ATVing is the best, so we signed up for that.  Since we were already going to be out that side of the island, we decided to do the bus tour of the movie sites first and then follow with the ATVs.

The ranch is on the opposite side of the island from where we live, kind of  between the North Shore and Kailua/Kaneohe.  Once you get out of Kaneohe town, the Kamehameha Highway is a beautiful, mostly waterfront drive in the Hawaiian "country".  No major stores or stoplights, just a nice winding road.  Just across the street from the ranch is the famed China Man's Hat moke, famous for it's obvious shape.

The property that the state now owns that includes the beach park for China Man's Hat used to be part of Kualoa Ranch until World War II when the government occupied much of the ranch for its strategic location on the island.  They built bunkers, made camps, even made an air strip.  After the war was over, they returned "most" of the property, but the state kept some key pieces.  There is a ton more history to the ranch, but I won't bore you all with it here...

Now onto our excursions...For the bus tour, think school bus with no windows.  Not the most luxurious or comfortable modes of transportation, but you can't expect much when you're bouncing through dirt roads on a ranch.  The tour stops at several "famous" spots to get out and do a little exploring (like WWII bunkers used in many films, Hurley's golf course from Lost, Godzilla's footprint, "the log" from the first Jurassic Park.  Pretty neat, but we were ready for some excitement with the ATVs.

For anyone that has never been ATVing...it...is...fun.  I got my first taste of it many years ago in Louisiana when we were there for the softball world series and staying with an awesome host family (shout out to my Abbeville people!) and I was very excited to do it again.  Kathryn and Joe had never done it, so it was good we had a short practice drive before we went out with our group of 6 with a guide.  Part of the tour was a duplicate of the bus tour, but then we were able to go places the bus could not.  Most set pieces from films have to be broken down after filming is complete, but occasionally they keep some.  One of these was for the Gyroscope Ride platform from Jurassic World, which was way up the side of the mountain and very cool to walk out on.  We opted to do the 2 hour tour versus the 1 hour and we were glad we did because time flew by.  We were up hill, down hill, through streams, through brush and jungle...a little bit of everything.

The ranch has even more activities daily which we may need to check out when we have more visitors, but the ATV tour was definitely worth the trip out to the ranch and I highly recommend it to anyone with a little bit of an adrenaline junkie living in their subconscious! Aloha!