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Published: August 3rd 2006
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Note to readers: if you are on a plane landing at Kahluhi Airport in Maui at 4pm, do not reserve a room in West Maui. The traffic is unendurable!
That said, if you’re going to be in bumper to bumper traffic for 90 minutes, in Maui you at least have scenery to look at. The West Maui Mountains are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. And half the time the road runs right along the coast. The surf’s up, gang, and that accounts for some of this traffic mess.
I had a room at a Bed and Breakfast in the old whaling town of Lahainia. It turned out that this particular B&B has a two bedroom suite for “Grandma” and when demand is up, they rent out Grandma’s second bedroom. That was my room. It was very clean, but Grandma keeps the AC on warm.
In any case, after dinner I hit the sack, because I wanted to make the trek to the top of Maui’s largest mountain, Haleakala, for sunrise. This involved leaving the B&B at 3:15 am and driving almost two hours around hairpin curves, gaining 10,000 feet in the last 38 miles. I pulled into the last legal space in the summit parking lot at 5 am. (But lots of people park illegally, blocking other cars in - after all, who is going to leave before sunrise?
Everything you read warns you that the summit is very cold in the predawn hours, and in a long sleeved shirt and a very good wind jacket, I was still cold enough to feel my teeth chattering. Most of the crowd up there borrows blankets from their hotels, so that the scene does look like something from a refugee camp. On the summit, you’re above the clouds, so you watch as they turn from … well, not visible, really, to blue to lavender to a glowing pink. When the first sliver of the sun itself rose above the clouds, the whole crowd inhaled, “ahhh,” like the audience at Fourth of July fireworks.
I took about 10,000 photos, not only of the sunrise, but afterwords of silverswords (an endangered Haleakala flower which blooms in August and July - actually, it’s one of those flowers that takes from three to twenty years to bloom, then flowers only that one time) and of cyclist gangs (about 100,000 people each year sign up with a company to get hauled to the top of the mountain in a minivan, then climb out and roll down the mountain. I gather that it’s possible to go some 39 miles without ever pedalling). What with one thing and another, I had kept myself busy for three hours, then, in the rest room at the Visitor Center, I realized I had spots in front of my eyes. (Well, that was the first time I had nothing else to look at on the mountain!) I think my body was telling me it was time to head back to sea level.
The see-everything schedule had called for me to take the famous “Highway to Hana” for beautiful views of rainforest scenery, but it turned out I was pretty tired. Went back to West Maui and tried to nap, but Grandma’s was too warm to sleep, so I ended up on the beach at Lahainia. The
Rough Guide to Hawaii is a little disdainful of the Lahainia Beach, but right by the B&B there was shade and quiet and so it turned out fine for me. Mahimahi for dinner, a little historic walking around, and an early bedtime. I’m such a wild woman.
But wait! There’s more! Another West Maui beach, Makena or “Big Beach” has been named either the best beach in North America or the best beach in the world by various self-nominated authorities. So that turned into my Sunday destination. I got there early and stretched out on a nice piece of shady sand. There were signs everywhere about the “Dangerous Currents!!!!!” And the
Rough Guide noted that “Big Beach is actually extremely dangerous because it faces straight out to sea and lacks a reef to protect it.” The waves looked enormous to this midwesterner. (Maui News said that there were 5 foot wind waves on a 4 foot swell. I don’t know what that means to people who know what they’re talking about, but to me they were monsters.) So I sat in the shade and watched the surf - and all the people who ignored the signs - for an hour.
At that point, I thought I’d walk down the shore to Little Beach. Here’s what the
Rough Guide says about Little Beach:
“Walk right to the end of the beach here, and as if by magic a natural cleft in the cliff reveals the “stairway” across the rocks that enables you to reach the much smaller, and significantly safer, Litte Beach. Shielded once again by the rocky headland, and shaded by adjacent trees, this is perhaps the most idyllic swimming spot on Maui, with views of Molokini and Lanai.”
Wouldn’t you go?
But when I got to the, umm, “stairway,” I was looking at the most challenging climb I’d done yet in Hawaii. Even the locals had to use both hands. But I wanted to go swimming! So I tackled it, pausing about midway on a ledge to ask myself, “Do I really want to do this?” (Answer: look back down. Do you really want to do THAT?)
When I first saw Little Beach, the waves were even higher! By whose freakin’ definition is this significantly safer? And it was more crowded than Big Beach. The reason for the latter is that no one - No One - had any swimsuits on. The
Rough Guide had also warned that this was a clothing optional beach, but no one was choosing the swimsuit-on option. Well, okay. I have done this in the Netherlands, though I was skinnier and younger in those days. And it was better than facing that climb again immediately. So I found myself one of the last shady spots (Shady spots are at a premium when everyone is facing sunburn in their sensitive areas.) and took off my suit.
And I did want to go swimming - that was the whole point of getting in here. So “monster” waves or not, presently I did. Got tossed around a bit. Came back out. Went back in. Came back out. Ate my granola bar. Went back in. Etc.
All of this involved getting sand in places that would be very uncomfortable on the plane back to Honolulu (a 32 minute flight, I admit). So, dear reader, note for any future you might have going to the beach on your last day in Maui - there are public rest rooms at the Maui Mall.
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