Blogs from Halekala National Park, Maui, Hawaii, United States, North America

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 ... read more

Day 9 Awake at 4am, tummy not feeling well but we were up early again anyways for another volcano hike. I know that this is meant to be a vacation and we haven't stopped.. going to need a vacation from our vacation ? I had signed us up for a 12 mile (about 20km) volcano trek leaving at 8.30am, we stopped at the local supermarket to grab lunch and water before making our way up to the Haleakalā Volcano which is close to 10000ft above sea level, this is the largest volcano on Maui. It took over an hour to get there and while we waited for our tour guides to drive back down to the 8000ft parking lot and hitch a ride back to to the top we checked out the visitor centres and the ... read more

It was a couple of hours drive to Haleakala national park. It's the same park we'd visited on the Hana Trip when we walked through the bamboo forest, but as it's so big, today we were more towards the northern part which is more volcanic as opposed to the rainforest we were at on Tuesday. Bridget was our driver today and she dropped us to the visitors centre before parking the vans at the top and hitch hiking back down (something quite common here!) It was a lovely view already and we had a look at the Silversword conservation greenhouse which was experimenting with the growths of the plants with varying amounts of water. Apparently these plants exist nowhere else in the world and take approximately 50 years to grow before they die off. We had ... read more

Here are the rest of the pictures from Halekala.... read more

On this day I island hoped to Maui. I took of the Hana Highway via a tour group. This line of highway was very scenic. Most of the highway was plush green, with some waterfalls (there was not heavy rain recently, therefore the waterfalls were not abundant as they could have been). The highway has a lot of curves, some rough parts, and some parts where only one car could fit (i.e. one lane highway, especially crossing bridges). The black beaches, there are a couple, are from the lava flow and are lava pebbles. It was strange walking on them at first because black beaches are not routine. For our first stop on the highway, there were surfers. I attempted to get a good photo of them but no such luck. There was one fella that ... read more