maui photos cont’d

It hasn’t even been a week and already my memories of the sun and the sand are fading.  Darned Alberta spring’s which bring a mix of sun and snow.  I’m not actually bitter but I’m worried that a snow storm will get in the way of birthday celebrations with friends from afar as they have for the past two years.  Anyways, onto the main subject of this post – photos!

Today I’m focusing on what was definitely a highlight of the trip and one of the only pieces that won’t be hampered by the stubborn little detail of an unfinished roll of film in the underwater camera.

Last weekend we headed up Haleakala, or House of the Sun to escape the box jellyfish that are known to head towards leeward (swimming) beaches 8-10 days following the full moon.  I’m guessing there’s not much of a problem with jellyfish since everyone we spoke to seemed to be surprised to even hear about them but I wasn’t interested in taking any chances!

Haleakala is of course a volcano.  My details on the history of the volcano and the facinating tales that relate to it are sketchy at best but I hope to get into my book on Hawaiian myths and legends because it sounds so interesting and I’m sure will make for great teaching material too.

We spent two nights camping a good deal of the way up the mountain at Hosmer Grove.  It was a little weird to tent in a field with a group of strangers but we met some great people over dinner and trips to the car.

After getting up early – but not quite early enough – for sunrise the first day we decided to act on numerous recommendations and take a hike on the sliding sands trail to the Ka Lu’u o ka Oo cindercone.

The landscape up here was quite barren in comparison to sea level but it reminded me so much of “home”, which in the case refers to the Rocky Mountains (I’ve lived close to them on both sides).  The temperature was similar to what we get in the summers and the weather was constantly changing from cool, vicious breezes to still air and intense sunshine, to cloudy with some rain.  Thankfully on this trip there was no snow.

There were marked differences as well.  Whereas here we have the hard work of hiking up first, this trip started with the descent.  And while the surface we hiked on looked similar there was a wider range of colours and hiking on it felt markedly different.  Instead of talus that slows your ascent, the volcanic material stays “still”, probably because the root materials that have been eroded are so different. Anyways, it was a great hike and I’ve enjoyed going through the photos for this post.  I hope you enjoy them too.

photos – part 1

Now that I’ve gotten all this Waldorfy news out of the way it’s time for photos from our trip. I only realized when using my camera for the painting photo that we took photos of us and our gear before we left.

I admit that I often forgot there was a camera around but between the two of us we were able to snap some shots to remind us of our trip.

In our first beach day we headed to Big Beach on the recommendation of friends who were on the island a month earlier.  This beach was stellar but it was definitely one of the more popular stellar beaches.  The locals were reporting the trade winds to be stronger than usual but memory tells me this was the first pleasantly windy beach we found – the others on the north shore and even in Kihei, just a short distance north of Big  Beach were too windy for our liking.

Our favourite beach in Maui was in our least favourite town if you can call it that.  Before I was born my folks made a trip to Hawaii and while they were on Maui they stayed in Ka’anapali.  The tourist map indicated it was the first master-planned resort community in the US.

Kevin at Big Beach

Urban planning is definitely one of my interests but the “master planned” part makes me laugh and frustrates me at the same time.  Sure most of the guests have views of the ocean from their room and easy access to the beach but I’m not a fan of that kind of tourism.  It quite irritates me actually.

Countless times we’d come across teenagers talking on their cell phones to their friends that were only a few feet away.  And of course, the developers of these sites wanted grass everywhere so there’s quite a bit of soil (from erosion) and chemical going straight into the ocean.  I definitely don’t like that.  The waves though were great.

On our last day we returned to this place and while there were still a lot of beach breaks we went further out and floated on the 6 foot waves and dove under the ones that broke further out.  I still need to finish up the roll of film in the underwater camera to get photos from our play in the water but here are ones of both of us and the eroded beach from when we first visited Ka’anapali.