2 last days in Maui to record before we head to Kona and the big island to continue our travels.
Day 1
The best time to snorkel is the morning, as the water is calm. A helpful note in our condo specified that the wind picked up around 1 each day, which strikes us as crazy - such a regular thing that it can be recorded and explained so simply? …But yeah, the wind picks up almost exactly at one every day, and since it’s warm enough to swim by 9, we did a little early swimming. Jake saw a turtle while snorkeling, and Kelsey mastered boogie boarding, though the waves are small enough that she couldn’t do it without getting very sandy. The sea turtles, we would learn, swim around many areas and even come up to the beach to sleep at night on occasion. They are protected - touching a turtle nets you a hefty 10K fine - but they get very close and are not afraid of humans.
After a morning at the beach we headed over to Lahaina with a very nice Uber driver named Patricia, who gave us her phone number in order to set up a ride to the airport later on. We were heading, not for the shops and promenade of Lahaina proper, but for the bay just preceding it, for a whale watching trip. Kelsey spotted a bar to wait at until the boat left, but Jake thought it would be irresponsible to drink before getting on a boat full of children…which turned out to be moot when we got to the boat and realized there was a full bar on board. Kelsey’s Mai Tai count: 6, Jake’s count: 4.
The whale watching trip was AMAZING. As we were first leaving the bay we saw two whales in the distance fully breaching out of the water. We had two hours full of literal gasps and pointing into the distance to chase down the coolest views. The girl on the microphone says you have to give them a berth of at least 100 yards, and that they usually try to make it more like 200. She said that sometimes the whales come up close to the boat and they have to stop and turn off the engines until the whales leave, which they call a “whale mugging.” Unfortunately we didn’t get mugged by any whales, but we did see a few whales pick their heads up out of the water and got some really great pictures. All in all, great success.
Interesting to hear from our guide how much we don’t actually know about whales and their behavior. They’re so big and fast, it’s nearly impossible to study them in a controlled setting. So a lot of the behavior we saw is not well understood - something may be aggressive, but not necessarily competitive, perhaps just playful. One detail that was interesting is that the humpbacks all sing the same song, which slight differences in pitch. However, this song evolves slowly over time, so the song that all the whales were singing 10 years ago would be completely different to the song they sing today. Once, scientists thought the song was for males to find a mate, but they sing it when they’re alone or with other males. Now the theory is that it’s conversational.
Day 2
We decided to take the road to Hāna today. It’s a legendarily twisty road that wraps around the less populous region of Maui. Total time on the road: 10 hours. Nicknamed the “Divorce Highway”, we traveled with a tour group lead by a guy named Scott who reminded Kelsey a little of Uncle Possum. We were on the trip with a very interesting mix of people - an older couple from Western Canada, a couple from rural Tennessee, a family of four from Maryland, and…a couple from south Brooklyn. One of whom…went to Skidmore. Small world! The tour took 3 main parts: the especially twisty northern section leading to Hāna, the area on the far eastern part of the island, and the bumpy, ill paved section of road leading back to Kihei.
We really didn’t know what to expect from the trip, but it was better than anything we would have thought. The guide talked through everything we drove by, explaining the plant life - like Noni, that he says cures a whole slew of ailments and is used in progressive cancer treatments - and the landmarks along the way. Scott said the road has 617 curves BEFORE you get to Hāna, and the back side of the rainforest was an even more treacherous drive. There was an area on the map that said “very rough road” that Scott dubbed “the Maui massage chair.” In total he estimated the road had a little over 1,800 curves.
The stops on the way were all beautiful. We went to a little roadside market with handmade trinkets and food, where Jake bought a pineapple banana bread. We saw about a dozen waterfalls, stopped at a black sand beach that was breathtaking, and had lunch at a flower farm. After lunch, we had a few more stops, including the seven sacred pools of Ohe’o, which were unfortunately closed due to the government shutdown, otherwise we would have had the opportunity to swim. After navigating a few more terrifying cliff faces by van, we ended up on the other side of Haleakalā, which is the name of the volcano around which the Hāna highway stretches.
On this side of the island, wild goats roam around eating the dead grass. There used to be rainforest here, but when the sandalwood trees were cut in the 18th century during the reign of Kamehameha, the forrests and The land dried up, a victim of the rapid change in ecology. Now there is very little rain, and the bus ran through giant rivets that used to be large rivers. “If you come back in 200 years, this will be rainforest again” - Scott explained that the island was undertaking a three stage program of reincorporation that will take generations of work to be successful. Scary to contemplate how long it can take to turn things back once they get bad. We made it back and enjoyed a quiet evening, our last on Maui.
