Tag Archives: Hana

Maui Diary – 10 On the Bottom

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All the books said that without an off-road vehicle, you should not make a loop around the island by driving all the way along “the bottom” of Maui. But permanent residents said it was o.k., so we did it! I was so happy for the chance to at least minimally explore this wide-open space, where little traffic is.
Mr. Glad needed a snack, however, before we would set out on the most lonely stretch of that road, and we found one of the famous Hana fruit stands on our route, a sort of Last Chance Saloon with yummy coffee and yet another new fruit find to give us a boost for the journey.
canistel or eggfruit

I bought mangoes, and an eggfruit, a.k.a. canistel. And while my husband sipped his coffee I snapped pictures of the garden and farm in back, and mentioned to the girl working there, “A friend told me before we came that Maui is a paradise — and he was right.”

“A lot of people say that,” she responded. “What do you mean by ‘paradise’?” We then had a philosophical and literary conversation about the books she has been reading, the Ringing Cedars series, in which the protagonist has ideas about creating paradise on earth, as I understood.


It was a rare sort of encounter for me, in which I find a stranger who wants to engage on topics of mutual interest, at a time when I also have the energy. I hated to leave her, and I took some more photos of the garden and farm behind the humble storefront.

This begonia resembled one I used to have in my house in California — but that one never bloomed….

 

 

Then we were on our way. The problems with the road are two: a stretch of several miles that is unpaved, and many miles of one-lane paved road. I was the driver for this trip, and I found the unpaved sections pretty easy. There were potholes, but the road was wide enough to maneuver around them.

 

 

 

 

 

For a while at the outset rain poured down and we kept the wipers going, but when it stopped we were quick to open the windows and let the ultra-fresh air blow through.

The breeze carried a mysterious and new fragrance, certainly the breathings of that wild coast’s unique set of botanicals.

 

 

Even the eroded lowest slopes of Haleakala Volcano on our right seemed to me the most beautiful sight, while I was getting that kind of air in my lungs.

 

 

 

On the left side of the road, we looked down on the beach, empty of humanity.

 

 

Once I stopped to get a closer whiff of this plant — but on its own at least it didn’t smell much.
 

Mr. Glad discovered a rainbow behind us, and I let him do the honors of capturing that extra blessing of our adventure. Lacking a scratch-and-sniff feature on my computer, or any kind of words that can do justice to this stretch of coastline, I’ll let it be The End of this day’s diary of Maui.

Maui Diary 7 — Hana

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Hamoa Beach

Before we ever saw it, the town of Hana had taken on a mysterious and romantic identity in my mind, a sort of personality created out of the scattered facts and sayings gleaned from books and friends, such as:

Hana is remote, reached by a long and winding, narrow road… The residents like it that tourists find it troublesome to get to… Many stores only take cash, and businesses close early… There’s not much night life… The beaches are black, or red-and-white, or the usual white/grey, but always mythical… It rains most days on that side of the island.

No doubt I also connected the sound “hah-nah” to that other geographical name that resonated not only in my ears but in my soul: Hoh. That was another moist place we visited, a river and a forest that teemed with life and constant change, and which I found soothing and exhilarating at the same time.

We reserved a condo in Hana for one night so that we wouldn’t have to hurry back to our home base on the South Shore as soon as we reached this destination. Good thing, because as it was, our experience of Hana was too short for comfort, and bittersweet.

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran said that “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'” I don’t mean to be superficial; I always long for plenty of time to get to know a new person or place to some degree higher than a Casual Meeting. Hana must think I am a flirt; I hope I can go back and demonstrate otherwise.

We arrived in Hana in the afternoon, and missed visiting the famous black beach because we were late for an appointment (oh, that is so un-Hana-ish) on the other side of town. But we had our own lesser black beach that we could see right off the deck of our room. In the picture above you can barely see it on the other side of the building, a little dark strip.

Spider Lily

At dusk we walked on those steep slopes of black gravel, and the wind blew my hair every which way as rain began to fall. Quite a lot of rain fell in the night, and we could hear it along with the pounding waves, through the doors that I insisted on leaving open so that I could feel the magical Hawaiian air.

In the morning we packed up and went early to Hamoa Beach — there are those soft-toned exhalations again — where the sky and sea looked dark and coldly unfriendly like our Northern California beaches — but beyond the colors, there was no likeness at all. Mr. Glad walked out into the waves and swam in the warm water to his heart’s content, while I waded and dug my toes into the so-soft sand. I took pictures, and noted that the Spider Lilies here looked fresh and perky compared to the ones on the sunnier side of Maui.

For a little while it seemed that we were the only people on Hamoa Beach. On the beach, yes, but there was a surfer out beyond the breakers. He caught my eye when he stood up on his board, a muscular brown islander guy (surely the same hunk I had seen on a postcard), and let the surf bring him all the way in.

On The Most Beautiful Beach in the World, wasn’t that just the perfect scene enacted for our delight? When he carried his surfboard out of the water I told him, “Watching you ride that wave completed my experience of Maui.”

“Is it your first time on the island?” he asked. Then he extended his hand to shake mine and said, “Welcome to Maui!”