Advertisement
Published: June 19th 2022
I’m up at 1.15am for the second time in two days in the hope that this time the bus that‘s supposed to take me up Mount Haleakala won’t leave me behind. It’s a full load, and our guide introduces himself as Trevor.
I appear to be one of the younger members of the party. The email that came with the booking confirmation included “you must be able to hike a 1/2 mile at elevation and over uneven surfaces”; a few of these guys seem to be struggling to even get up the steps into the bus. They all finally manage to get seated. We haven’t rolled away from the hotel yet, but some of them are now telling Trevor that they’re feeling a bit motion sick and asking him if he’s got any bags. I’m sensing we might be in for an interesting morning.
We head off into the night and start the long windy climb up to the summit, which is up at over 3,000 metres above sea level. We stop at about 2,000 metres and get out to stretch our legs. It’s ridiculously cold and the wind feels like it‘s about to cut me in half. The
confirmation also included “we recommend bringing a light jacket. It gets chilly sometimes.” They weren’t kidding, and we’ve still got a long way to go to get to the top. When I booked I was asked to nominate if I wanted the tour company to supply a jacket and if so in what size. It seems however that a few of the elderly passengers have decided that they’ll be fine in their tee shirts. Hmmm. Trevor’s brought jackets for them anyway which is probably just as well in more ways than one; I'm not sure it'd be all that great for business if word started to get around that you were losing the occasional guest to hypothermia.
Trevor tells us all to be very careful when we’re walking around up here as the company doesn’t have any insurance. Huh? This outfit‘s operating at a volcano in the most litigious country on the planet and they aren’t covered if someone falls in….or gets hypothermia. I wonder if the company we used to go to Hana yesterday had insurance. We did both have to sign twenty page waivers before they’d let us set foot on the bus, if that’s any indication.
The views down over the lights of central Maui have been great, but as we plough on upwards it’s a bit hard not to notice that we now seem to be in thick cloud, and the rain’s blowing in horizontally. Hmmm. No worries says Trevor, the weather can change really quickly up here. We press on, and the weather does indeed change … the cloud gets thicker and the rain gets heavier. We reach the summit and Trevor asks if any of us want to get out. He gently suggests that this might not be a great idea, which is not too surprising given it’s now somewhere around two degrees, and probably closer to minus ten if you include the wind chill, not to mention that the rain’s beating in harder than ever. The time for sunrise arrives and we all relent and make our way up to the “viewing” platform along with several hundred other brave souls. It’s hard to tell whether the sun’s up or not, and visibility’s down to about 50 metres. There’s probably a crater down there somewhere but most onlookers have now got their backs to it to stop the icy needles of sleet
drilling holes into their faces. There’s an astrophysical observatory up here. We could see it clearly from sea level on the way back from Hana yesterday, yet here we are this morning a hundred metres or so away from it and it’s completely invisible. We beat a dejected retreat back to the warmth of the bus. I ask Trevor how often this happens expecting him to say every second day. But no, it seems that this is the first time in about a month and a half, and to rub salt into the wound he quickly adds that the summit was clearly visible from his house when he left it this morning at around 1am.
So just to summarise. I’ve got up at 1.15am on two of the last three mornings. On the first of these the bus forgot to pick me up, and if it had I would have had a perfect view of the sunrise. In fact I would have had a perfect view on any of the past forty odd mornings, except for this one, when I was in fact able to see precisely zero. If luck evens up over time I think that now might
well be a very good time to buy a lottery ticket.
We start the long drive back down the mountain, making a brief stop for breakfast along the way at an establishment called Kula Lodge. Trevor didn’t say a lot on the way up, but he’s now making up for lost time. I think he might be hoping that filling us with knowledge might at least partly compensate us for missing the one and only thing we came to see, ie the sunrise, and half freezing to death in the process. He asks everyone whether there are any “other criminals” on the bus, as he knows there’s at least one. Huh? He then pats me gently on the head as he reminds the others that all Aussies come from convict stock. Cheeky sod. He tells us he was born in South Africa. It seems he was originally a not too successful professional surfer in Europe, and came here for three months thirty years ago to try his luck and never left. He’s the first to admit that he was no good at school, but he’s clearly read extensively since on the history, geology and environment of these parts and
is a mine of interesting information. He’s got a particularly strong interest in Captain James Cook who he regards as history’s greatest ever navigator. It’s a pity that some of the elderly folk seem to have no interest at all in what he’s saying, and have decided instead that now is as good a time as ever to start chatting loudly among themselves, drowning Trevor out in the process. It somehow feels totally in keeping with the tone of the day….. Hmmm.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.069s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 18; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0408s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Hawaii
We are enjoying your Hawaii blogs. Thanks for sharing.