Maui, Day 7

Straight to the pictures here.

Day 7: The Road to Hana. We agreed that if the weather looked bad, we’d hit the road again and do part of the road to Hana. Our plan was to till about mile marker 14-15 on the Hana Hwy, then turn around (once you hit the highway, it’s about 33-34 miles to Hana). What I wasn’t planning on was going all the way to Hana. For the last 15-20 miles, we were watching the gas gauge closely, relying on what we’d been told which was “gas can be found in Hana” (lucky for me, the gas station was open). I’m getting ahead of myself though…

Waterfalls: We stopped at quite a few waterfalls; most of them very easily accessible from the road, and a couple of them were really incredible. The one good thing about the weather is that all of the waterfalls were running fairly strong…too strong in one case which ruined the effect (one waterfall is called “The Three Bears” but in fact because there was so much water, is was more like one big bear than three). Still, all of the Falls were really cool to see and we did some minor scrambling to get to a couple of them.

One of my favorite parts was scrambling off the path a little to an upper fall. By far and away, though, best waterfall was the last one we stopped at, on our way out. Our guidebook warned that technically, we weren’t supposed to be hiking on the road you had to go on to get to the Falls – but we went for it anyways and were rewarded with a huge, cascading water-fall that rivals Snoqualmie Falls…it was powerful, and beautiful.

One of our other memorable moments was at one of the parks we stopped at. The park had a paved trail that led to a couple of small waterfalls; however, our guidebook spoke of a much better waterfall hire up. We set on the small dirt trail and ended up at a culvert of some kind. The only way to cross the culvert was along this 12” wide walkway – on one side, if you fell, you’d simply fall into the culvert of rushing water. On the other side, if you fell, you’d fall a little furter…about 50-60’ – yikes! We pressed on and were rewarded with privacy and a nice waterfall into a pool. We hiked around a little further and found a couple more of these such “crossings” – apparently, the culverts help to irrigate the land below. I finally put my foot down when we came to one crossing which was much longer than the others…

The road: The Hana Highway would be better named “The Hana crawl-way” as many people literally “creep” along the road. And if you know me well, you know that I hate slow or bad drivers…and there were plenty of them on this road; you know, slowing down to 5-10 mph around every corner. Further, there’s really no places to pass; you have to hope that 1) the drivers know they’re slow, 2) the drivers see you behind them, and 3) they are polite enough to pull over and let you pass. Needless to say, on the drive in, the last 45 minutes or so (about 12-15 miles), a lady driving a car didn’t seem to appreciate items 1, 2 or 3, and she ended up with about 8-10 of us following her quite slowly.

We found another nice taco stand for lunch, although nothing topped the “marinated Kalua Pork” that we got the day before. Still, a good place for lunch and definitely a “local” flavor.

On the way back we stopped in a surfer town to check out a natural foods store they had and Julie was in heaven…I think she could have stayed there for a few hours. The store was quite large and carried a number of Gluten Free items…so we stocked up a bit.

On the way back from Hana we got our first “really cool” whale sighting, the first of 3. Julie spotted them and I made in illegal left turn into one of those beach parks…they were very close to shore and we watched them in the light rain for about 30 minutes.

Straight to the pictures here.