The popularity of traveling and tourism is such that it is now commonplace for tourists to travel through several time zones and to immerse themselves for a few days in cultures very different from their own. Although the psychiatric literature contains a number of studies relevant to migrant populations, little is known about the stresses and psychiatric problems that are closely related to the travel experience itself. That emotional difficulties might be associated with travel is implied by the fact that “vacation” is worth 13 points on Holmes and Rahe's Social Readjustment Rating Scale. 1 In an exploratory study, Kimura, Mikolashek, and Kirk 2 stated that many newcomers to Hawaii experienced psychiatric crises resulting in their being seen in the emergency room. They hypothesized that a common dynamic among those who developed psychiatric crises was that of trying to escape problems at home but finding instead that their difficulties had come with them and were compounded by the stress of traveling and relocation. This syndrome is known locally as the “coconuts and bananas syndrome,” referring to the myth that life is so easy in Hawaii that one can simply pick food off of trees. In this paper, the psychiatric emergencies associated with travel to Hawaii are systematically evaluated and certain patterns are delineated. Hawaii is an ideal place to study the psychiatric problems associated with travel and tourism. In 1976, over 9,000 visitors entered Hawaii per day, according to data from the Hawaii Visitors Bureau. The daily census of tourists on the island of Oahu alone was about 77,000. The great majority of newcomers to Hawaii are, of course, tourists, but some come for other reasons including relocation. This group accounted for roughly 2,500 persons per month. The present study was untertaken to discover more fully the psychiatric problems of newcomers to Hawaii.