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Forget El Dorado and the Garden of Eden; forget the mythical valleys of Cockayne and the shimmering hills of Galilee. The real land of plenty is Waikiki, on the sun-baked southern shores of Ohau, where along with the proverbial milk and honey you’ll find cheeseburgers, French fries and mai tais, not to mention sky-scraper sized mocha coconut frappacinos and $12.95 all you can eat buffets. You name it, Waikiki has it.

Lots of it.

It also has — as I recently discovered to my great surprise — style. Not the kind of style you’ll see on the catwalks of Paris, but style all the same. Despite the highrise and the shopping malls, the Gloria Jeans and Starbucks and Jack in the Box fast food outlets, Waikiki, that short strip of beach and parkland with Diamond Head in the background, is still a physically arresting place, with a velvety luxuriance that no amount of multi-storey mega-hotels seems able to squash.

In ancient times, Waikiki was the power centre of Ohau’s ali'i (high chiefs), who were attracted to the area for its rich farming and good surfing, which, then as now, formed an integral part of Hawaiian culture. (Christian missionaries, arriving in 1820, tried to eradicate the practice, along with hula, which they deemed “lewd and suggestive”.) As the nearby town of Honolulu grew in the early 19th century, Waikiki became an escape for Hawaiians and westerners alike, with some haole (foreigners) building mansions and beach cottages amidst the duck ponds and taro fields. By the late 1880s, entrepreneurs were offering bathing houses for day visitors and small cottages for overnight guests. Waikiki, as we know it today, had begun to take shape.

Still, it wasn’t till after the Second World War (when the beach was covered with unsightly rolls of barbed wire), and the advent of long distance commercial jetliners that Waikiki really took off. Before long the area was transformed from a dozy satellite suburb of Honolulu into a gleaming neon money magnet, a tropical honeypot luring visitors with the promise of palm trees, sunsets, and grass skirted girls. By the time Elvis Presley sung “Rock-a-hula Baby” in the 1961 movie Blue Hawaii, the islands, and the resort centre of Waikiki, were fixed in the public’s eye as the tropical idyll par excellence; sunny, safe and a little bit sexy, albeit in a coconut-bikini kind of way.

Today Waikiki is bigger and busier than ever. On any given day there are some 65,000 visitors mingling with 25,000 locals, all in an area barely 2km long and 1km wide. Kalakaua Avenue, the main drag that runs parallel to the beach, is a pop-culture pressure cooker, a fascinating and bizarre blend of Polynesia and Las Vegas where buskers, touts and jugglers mix it with surfers and hippies and retirees tanned to the richest burgundy. Curiously, Waikiki has become the vacation of choice for everybody from skinny homies in baggy jeans to Paris Hilton look-a-likes who teeter about on high-heels, bundles of shopping bags strung over their shoulders. It’s the kind of place where you’ll see a mobile anti-abortion clinic parked next to a man in a sandwich board advertising “Hawaii’s Safest Indoor Shooting Range!” (“REAL GUNS! REAL AMMUNITION!”)

And yet somehow it all works. Despite or maybe because of all the kitsch, you’d have to be dead and buried in a lead-lined coffin not to have fun here. There is the food (fresh and plentiful), the drink (plentiful and strong: I urge caution with the mai tais), and, of course, the locals, who, considering the fact that their home has been turned into the world’s biggest packaged holiday, remain remarkably nice. When they say “Aloha” it’s usually like they mean it. Everybody seems so unrelentingly amiable you begin to suspect they’re all on permanent holiday. (They’re not: Hawaii has the lowest unemployment rate, 2.7 percent, of any US state, which might explain why they’re so happy.) The longer I stayed, the more difficult I found it to imagine them doing anything particularly nasty to anyone, let alone beating one Captain James Cook to death with shark-tooth clubs, as happened in 1779. (He must have really had it coming.)

On my last day on Ohau I hired a convertible and drove to the North Shore, just one-and-a-half hours away. I passed over cloud wreathed mountains and along coast roads fringed with green. There were scruffy towns full of warped wooden houses; tattered flags, families picnicking on deserted beaches. The world slid by in snatches; shrimp shacks and shave-ice stores, monster trucks and Methodist churches. I saw Sunset Beach and Shark’s Cove, Banzai Pipeline and Three Tables. At Waimea Bay I swam with a green sea turtle not five yards off the sand.

Finally, in the town of Hale’iwa (pop. 2300), I stopped in at a store selling hand made ice cream. It was called Flavormania. I sat on the low porch, smelling the air, which was thick and sugary. The local reefs, I remembered, offered some of the best big wave riding in the islands. But that was in winter, and, alas, it was summer now, which negated any obligation to do anything as energetic as checking out the surf. So I sat for a while, and, after much deliberation, went and bought another ice cream. Then I hopped back in the car and drove back down to Waikiki, the wind in my hair all the way.

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