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Holiday! Visions of golden beaches…. palm trees…. Hawaiian hula dancers swinging their hips on the beach, a lei being placed around your neck as you leave the plane and step onto their glorious sand …. No…no Hawaiian dancers greeting us, no lei to place around our neck….but …… Honolulu was exciting and a beautiful site to see. The travel magazines definitely described it well!
Glistening bodies in the sun, lying on the golden coloured sand …the water was clear and blue and no waves as there was a low breakwater designed to create a safe beach area for families Out on the horizon you could see the small safe waves break and wanna-be surfers learning to ride their boards, complete with sail boats…..a wonderful family place. And then there were the beach umbrellas!
Now I know that Bondi beach in Sydney is probably the same but where we come from, you just don’t see this vision. In front of us and around us were a sea of blue umbrellas all side by side, then a sea of pink umbrellas… all complete with bodies draped on towels or armchairs. Then as we strolled along the shoreline, just like you saw in the movies there before us a bank of cloth draped gazebos with cushioned lounges under them greeted our eyes- it was like waiting for Marilyn Monroe to walk out and lie on the deck chair surrounded by these curtains of fabric flowing in the breeze . Yes, just as we imagined it!
But no rash guards (rashies)! Here before us was a sea of bodies exposed to the sun burning into their skin…. little ones, aged people. Families with small children and of course the younger crowd in their skinny bikinis and skimpy board shorts just lying there worshipping the sun with its golden hue searing their frames as they revered its power. We were amazed! Not this little black duck- I was draped in a scarf…. I must have looked so out of place! But the weather was hot and humid, the sun shining brightly upon our hat covered heads as we explored the streets of Waikiki beach.
In so many ways, just like the Gold Coast – high rise ritzy-looking resorts, a street of Gucci and other expensive shops similar to Cavel Ave, then areas of touristy shops filled with trashy souvenirs. Sort of what we expected despite the 10-hour flying time from Sydney – beach holiday resort destinations tend to take on a pattern regardless of the country you are in. The main difference, the souvenirs were Hawaiian patterned shirts and sarongs (made in Bali or Thailand), wooden ‘artefacts’ depicting Hawaiian gods and surfers, and numerous jewellery with shells and ‘pearls’ of dubious quality.
Still, we had decided to take the time and ‘see it for ourselves’ and we did. Probably the most memorable part was sitting at a sheltered picnic bench near the beach and spending several hours just people watching. A tale in itself.
Now Maui was another adventure.
Far away from the beaches of Waikiki is the island of Maui. The terrain is different as we travel through lush rainforest and walk on volcanos. Yes, the beaches are there but this is not why we came to Maui.
Volcanos and waterfalls were the highlights. Towering over the island of Maui and visible from just about any point, Haleakala is a force of nature in every sense. It is a massive shield volcano that forms more than 75% of the Hawaiian Island of Maui. I found it interesting at ground level when you scanned the horizon and see the cloud blending with the horizon…..but no, deceptively there towering above the clouds is this mountain top…cool and calm. At 10,023 feet (3,055 metres for us here) above sea level, this dormant volcano is the stage for a breathtaking range of landscapes—and skyscapes.
Haleakala actually means “house of the sun” in Hawaiian, and legend goes that the demigod Maui lassoed the sun from its journey across the sky as he stood on the volcano’s summit, slowing its descent to make the day last longer so that his mother would have time to dry her kapa cloth. A compromise ensured, kala, the sun would travel slower ½ the year to allow time for people to grow their crops and Maui’s mother to dry her kapa cloth, and the sun would travel faster the other ½ of the year thus creating the season.
Many visitors drive up this mountain to see the sunrise and apparently this is the busiest time on the summit – so busy you need to make reservations to drive up. But we didn’t. I much preferred staying in bed just that little bit longer and then navigating the windy roads to the summit to enjoy nature when I could appreciate it as well as to miss the crowds! I mean I am supposed to be on holidays after all! But, it really was amazing. There is nothing in Australia – where we live – that resembles any aspect of this volcanic mountain.
Imagine yourself rising high above the world and you are immersed in this white cloud, enveloping you in its serenity. You think you are high above the world and escaping from life for just a little while in your own little world …and then you rise above the cloud as if in an airplane. And the road just continues to wind higher and higher and higher…and then there before you is the summit. You are standing on the summit of this volcano. You look -the cloud is actually below you. You are higher than the clouds in this different world. It’s much colder as the wind grips you but here, rare, and compelling features abound, such as multi-coloured cinder cones – reds, ochres, yellows, greys and blacks. Called pu’u in Hawaiian, these cinder cones form “when gas is trapped in lava during an eruption and forces the lava to eject as a fountain, the hot lava falls as sticky cinders all around the base of the fountain and a pu’u is built.” And of course, there is the walk into the crater.
Now do you really think we would just look at the trails below us as they disappeared into this natural phenomenon. Would that really be Marc and me? My sister-in-law wrote a message to say that she hadn’t heard any crazy adventure stories like vertical cliffs or 8 hour bike rides….and no we haven’t had any crazy adventures. But we did enjoy the thrill of actually walking into the volcano! Imagine that.
As for the other journeys … they were scenic.
Every tourist book mentions “The Road to Hana” as a ‘must do’. It is a scenic drive and the drive is ‘the destination’ not the town of Hana at the end which is definitely anti-climactic, especially if you are imagining a place big enough to have phone service or a shop with wi-fi as were hoping for (we still had business commitments back in Aus that needing attention).
It is described as a narrow road, 36 miles long, having around 600 turns 300 of which are hair-pin turns and 54 one-lane bridges. A wonderful day of motion sickness for me- believe me. I had to hang on at times and try to look elsewhere as waves of nausea hit me from all the twisting and turning. However, along the way are some waterfalls, some turn-offs to black-sand beaches or to some townships and that is the attraction. The problem is the tourist books saying it is a ‘must-do’ meaning EVERYBODY is on the road in vehicles ranging from the sensible motorcycle to mini-bus sized vans. And not all knowing the width of their vehicle – a very important detail on a narrow road hugging the cliff face and often with no guard rail on the outside of the road.
So we did the trip and found many times, there was often nowhere to pull off and park at the waterfalls so had to just glance on the way past. The turn-offs were better including a small village that had a church built in 1856 out of lava blocks. The church had withstood a tsunami in 1946 that had wiped out rest of the village. The Rainbow eucalypts are another sight we had never seen even coming from the actual home of eucalypts. The colours in the barks definitely better than any we had seen back in Aus.
Word of advice for anyone wanting to do the ‘Road to Hana’ and this was not in any guide book … do the sights in reverse. Suck it up and drive the 2 ½ hours to the end of the drive, then turn around and see the sights on the way back. This is because by the afternoon people seem to just want to get home so the pull-outs and waterfalls along the way are nearly deserted, so we did get a chance to stop and see them.
Was the road to Hana it really worth it ??? The waterfalls are not that impressive, and we’ve seen black sand beaches before. But, some of the sights are interesting particularly if you get off the main road and go for a walk. (obviously being married to Marc we did that!) Yes, do it but take your time, but plan for those times when two cars will not fit across the road and don’t expect the spectacular waterfalls of the main Island.
A drive not mentioned in the guide book it is doing the west end of Maui counter-clockwise. Most just drive clockwise from Lahaina and turn around at Kahakuloa where there is a blow hole nearby. Not Marc, he did the road less travelled. It made the Road to Hana look like a highway in comparison. Same narrow winding road hugging a rugged coast line with no guard rails but the one-lane sections MUCH longer.
Long enough that you could not see if another car had already entered the other end.
Long enough that sometimes the only way to guess whether a car was already on the one lane road approaching you was to monitor the road on the opposite side of the valley to see if there were any cars going into the head of the valley, noting the colour and type of car and you not entering the head of the valley until you have seen that car come out.
There were some scary times – We had one particularly precarious moment when we came across to cars head to head unable to pass in the middle of a long stretch of one lane road. We had to back uphill some 100 metres of so on said one lane road with no guard rail and a precipitous drop to the valley floor below to a slight widening in the road. I had to get out and help Marc manoeuvre the car tyres on to the gravelly edge – the edge was so close…with a cliff beside me that I could not even get back in the car since no ground to stand on – I would have fallen over the edge if I had tried! Gone…end of holiday- Kaput!
Then we waited and waited and waited for the two cars somewhere down in the trees at the head of the valley to duke-it-out. Eventually a car emerged but already several cars had gone into the valley from the opposite side. We knew there was no room down there to pass so just had to wait some more and stop the impatient driver behind us until, we guessed that there were no more cars in the long section of one-lane road and just gunned our way through. There was one poor lady in a large black jeep that we kept catching up to and passing since she was going very slowly with her knuckle white on the wheel. She would pull over and we would pass, then we would stop at a view point or shop and she would catch up and pass, and so forth. I think she definitely needed a strong scotch at the end of her day of driving. I know that I was trying to drive from my side of the car –( funny how the brake does not work on the passenger side) but ours was much more relaxed -if you could really call it that…and finished with some lovely, but a little oily, fish and chips at the lovely historic town of Lahaina.
Four days in Maui, therefore that meant four days of travel and sightseeing, that meant two very tired travellers…or one definitely tired traveller who had actually come away because she needed a break…now I need a break from my break!!