Road to Hana, part 1...

OK, OK, I'm sorry.  Several family and friends have called me out for hardly posting anything over the past month as well as doing a poor job of keeping in touch.  Well, I have plenty of things to post about, so look out.  March will contain a lot of posts since I've been busy exploring several islands and have had some great times with family and friends visiting Hawai'i.  Friendly reminder: you can subscribe in the upper right part of the webpage and it'll email you when a new one is up.  Onto the blog:

iPhone Rainbow

In January, my Dad was still in town visiting after the holidays.  We hopped over to Maui to visit for an extended weekend.  There are several adventurous things to do in Maui, and neither of us ever turn down excitement.  Up first was zip-lining!  Unfortunately, I received a call a couple minutes after getting off the plane telling us our reservations were rescheduled for a different day due to severe winds.  Humph!  The strong winds and driving rain that greeted us as we de-boarded the plane did provide one of the most vibrant rainbows I've ever seen (and I'm spoiled because I see a lot of rainbows...so me vouching for this rainbow says a lot!).  Plus it was a double rainbow.

We had planned on organizing the rest of our Maui vacation after we went zip-lining, so now we needed a quick plan B.  We had the whole day free so we decided to do the famous Road to Hana trip.

First, a few facts about Maui:
-Nickname is the Magic Isle.
-Second largest Hawaiian island.
-Population of about 150,000 people, which means it is not very populated.  Tourist tend to go here when they want to "get-away."  Reference: Honolulu (on O'ahu) has about a million people.
-Has many small little towns that are all spread apart from each other through out the island.
-The landscape is easiest to picture if you think of two huge hills (or volcanos) that are then connected in the middle.  Kind of like a 3-D figure 8, which the island sort of resembles on a map.  Hundreds of thousands of years ago the two hills/volcanos weren't connected, but have become connected due to erosion and run-off from the two volcanos settling between the two.
-Maui heavily exports sugar cane, and you see it anywhere there is flat land.
-Maui's main volcano, Haleakala, is still considered an active volcano and last erupted about 350 years ago.  It has not shown any signs of potential eruptions, but is still considered active due to the timespan since the last eruption.  It's had many eruptions over the past 1000 years (apparently 350 years in volcano-time is like a minute in human time).

OK, more about Haleakala later.  Road to Hana time!  Hana is a quaint little town on the East side of the island.  To get to it you have to take the Hana Highway.  Travelling the Road to Hana is a popular tourist activity.  Hana is only 52 miles away, but the Hana Highway is 68 miles in length and takes 2.5 hours to travel (without stopping).  It has approximately 620 hairpin turns and frequent one lane stretches.  It has 59 bridges and 46 of those are one lane wide.  All but one of those bridges date back to the 1910's when the road was initially constructed (they just built stuff better back then!).  The road winds through tropical rainforest the entire way, and passes countless waterfalls.

Unfortunately mother nature was not very kind to us during the first half of the day.  It varied between sprinkling and pouring during our entire trip to Hana.  I constantly struggled to keep my camera lenses dry, and eventually I gave up, so I didn't take many pictures.  We did get to see countless waterfalls, and all the rain was making them very energetic.

Vally along the Hana Highway

Rainy day.  Overlooking some sugar cane fields and the ocean in the distance.

This was an awesome waterfall.  It actually expanded even more to the right, but this was as far back as I could get from it.

Just following the steps down into the hole.

As we got close to Hana we saw a sign for the world's largest lava tube.  I wasn't entirely sure what a lava tube was (other than an obvious guess that it wasn't just a clever name), so the Pops and I decided to check it out.  After all, a tube implied there would be some form of shelter from the rain...or so we thought: water dripped from the ceiling of the tube at such a constant rate that it still seemed like it was raining!

A lava tube is basically a cave that lava flowed through a long time ago.  The outer part of the lava cooled first creating natural pipes (the volcano's "plumbing" if you will).  When the hot lava flowed back into the earth it left behind a large underground tube/cave.

The lava tube was really neat.  It was pitch black except for our flashlights.  The lava rock had many colors in it too.  The entrance is nothing more than a hole in the ground where part of the lava tube's ceiling caved in.

Pictures are hard to take in the pitch black but here is one I took at the beginning.

Another waterfall along the Road to Hana.

Once at Hana, Daddy-cracker and I had some lunch at the beach park (it was still raining).  Now the typical tourist would then head back along the Hana Highway from whence we came, but I always like to pretend that I'm a local - a coworker of mine told me there was a road that continued on around the backside of the island in a loop and people don't often realize this.  I think there was a good reason for this: the road was even more terrible and treacherous than the Hana Highway.  Our Ford Focus screamed the whole way. Luckily it survived, because I found out later that rental cars are not allowed on that stretch of road (apparently there was a sign that states this, but we must have missed it...oops!).  Being the adrenaline seeker that I am, I thought the road was totally fun, but I'm not sure how much my Father enjoyed it from the passenger seat as we blindly careened around the sides of cliffs on a rocky road with potholes which were far deeper than the Focus' ground clearance (yikes!).

As we headed around the Southeastern side of the Haleakala (the East volcano on Maui), we started to get out of the rain and enter beautiful pastures that sloped all the way from the clouds on our Right down to the sea on our Left.  Dad and I were treated with some beautiful views along the way.  Here is one picture to peak your interest, but I'll throw in some more for my next blog: The Road to Hana, part 2... (link is below)

Mahalo for visiting!  Click on this link to go to Road to Hana, Part 2...