Wet drive to Hana

The drive to Hana is supposed to be one of the ten most scenic drives in the USA, and a strong contender for the most scenic drive in Hawaii.  It's a twisty road through the jungle that takes around 2.5 hours to drive around 50 miles.

December 1 was another insanely wet day.  Rain is common on the north coast of Maui, and they say it rains somewhere every day in Hawaii, but we happened to be there during a week when it was raining constantly and heavily all over the Hawaiian islands.

Before we left the Airbnb though, we found this guy in the bed:

It was raining so much and so hard that we didn't take many photos while driving, but here are a few:

Waterfalls that the guidebook says are usually a trickle or dried up, were going full blast due to all the rain:

I think they grow Taro down there:

We were at a fairly standard lookout, and then turned around and saw these waterfalls off in the distance:

This is out behind our condo hotel once we got to Hana:

This is a blowhole spewing water after a wave, although with so much rain coming down the other way it's hard to see it:

Once we got the condo we settled in for a while to wait out the weather, luckily it was a nice place.   We did get out for a short walk later to go for groceries, but it was getting dark by then so no pictures.

Instead of Haleakala

The biggest reason we came to Hawaii was to see volcanoes.  Maui has a dormant one, Haleakala, and our goal for our first full day on the island was to go to the national park at the peak of it, and hike in the crater.

We stopped at this lookout on the way.  We're still on the north coast of the island here.  There's a mountain in that cloud on the horizon.  The weather has so far been very volatile and was forecast to remain so:

Here we have turned inland and are heading up towards the volcano.  It's in that rain up ahead.  The guidebook says that the mountain can be ringed by rain and still be clear at the summit, so we decided to give it a go:

Driving in and out of showers as we proceed upland.

Shortly after this the rain got too relentless for photos.  When we got to the park entrance, it was windy with horizontal rain and poor visibility.  The ranger advised that while we could go up, it was no better at the summit and they were recommending that people not go.  Sigh.  This was our only chance to go up, as well, but the weather was dangerous (winds gusting up to 60 mph) so we turned around.

There were sunny patches, but in that cloud on the horizon is the other mountain, so weather is still not great over most of Maui.

We got out the guidebook and looked for something we could do in this volatile weather.  We decided to go to a botanical garden first.  Here are just a few photos, we saw lots of interesting plants and flowers:

Next we thought we would try a drive along the southern coast of the island, as that is the dry side.  Here we are heading south, and that is the small island of Kaho'olawe in the distance.

This ended up being a spectacular drive.  The ever-changing clouds were amazing, and the semi-barren land gave impressive expansive views.

This is our rental car.  I picked the orange one as I correctly figured we'd find it more easily in parking lots:

Note the rainbows in the next two photos:

I had lots more interesting photos, but that gives you a taste of the south coast of Maui.   Not your average tropical landscape, but totally breathtaking.

Flying into Maui

I've always wanted to go to Hawaii, ever since the Brady Bunch went there in the after-school reruns I'd watch back in the 1970's.  It's just so darned far away though, at least it was when I was in Canada.  Since I started spending part of the year in LA back in 2009, it's been on my list of places to go, but it's only now that we plan a permanent move back to Ottawa that we actually decided we must go, while it's still 5 hours flight instead of 10.

We decided to visit four islands, Maui, Big Island, Kauai, and then fly home again via Oahu.  On November 29 we flew into Maui.

Here is our first glimpse, there is some mountain peeking out above those clouds as we circle around the southern coast of the island:

Coming around the southwest side of the island:

I think this is an old lava flow, maybe from the 1800's or so?  We didn't realize as we flew over it that that's what it was though, we only found out when we drove over it the next day:

Heading into the "saddle" that divides the two volcano mountains from each other.  This photo looks like it's on an angle, but the horizon is actually the slope of the Haleakala volcano:

We were too new to realize the cloudy and rainy conditions on landing were foreshadowing for the trip ahead ...

October visit to Pink's Hot Dogs

In catching up on my travel photos, I came across these from our visit to Pink's Hot Dogs on October 6.  We'd been meaning to go for years to this iconic tourist destination.  The day we finally went, it turns out that they were filming a segment of Access Hollywood there.  These 3 pictures are screen captures from when it aired.

So these obviously aren't photos of us, but if you look at the background we are behind the 2 owners of Pinks as they talk to Natalie and the other host, I forget her name:

It was kind of fun to do two Hollywood things at once - go to Pinks, and to be an accidental extra on TV at the same time.

Montana de Oro State Park

Montana de Oro State Park offers several hiking trails.  The first one we chose turned out to be a dud (it was a canyon hike, but was very overgrown and the canyon was a bit of a snore) so we hiked along the shoreline instead, and it was fabulous.  This is from September 14.

This is the trail that we gave up on after around half an hour, the Coon Creek trail:

This is more like it!  We went and did a piece of the Bluff trail instead:

I liked this square-ish sea arch, with another cave in the background behind it:

Another arch, this one was 3-sided:

There's a linear pattern to the shoreline on the coast here that points out to sea:

After the Bluff trail, we dropped by Spooners Cove and had a look around:

For the last little hike of the day, we went to see the tide pools near Hazard Reef.  We had trouble finding the official trail though, and ended up on one of many trails that hike over the sand dunes down to the tide pools:

This is steeper than it looks ... the sand was HOT and the footing was unstable, being deep sand:

The tide pools were OK, pretty slimy and no interesting sea creatures, but I liked the pockmarked rocks that were everywhere:

Back up the dune trail.  This is the only hike I've ever been on where I had serious doubts as to whether we'd make it or not, the sand was so steep in places and the surface gave way with every step.  Here is Ed following me up:

Yay, we made it!

A great end to a great few days of hiking in and around this park.