More from Maui
Jun. 28th, 2018 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
I'm sort of working in random order here, but this post will at least finish up the last of the photos from the trip to Maui last month. After that there's the dive video to wrestle with instead!
We stayed at a condo village in Wailea next door to the hotel my work conference was in. It cost half as much as the hotel for twice the space and five times the balcony size. Definitely a good pick! The view from it was pleasing too.
There's a beachfront path all through Wailea, which is on the west coast, so each evening we could stroll along to wherever we were eating dinner with views like this:
Or this:
Or sometimes with more cloud, like this:
There was plenty of local wildlife in the condo complex (all except the sea turtles were invasive species of course), like the mongoose.
You didn't need an alarm clock with the grey francolins calling at dawn each day. Those are noisy birds...
We took a trip up to the summit of Haleakala, climbing above the clouds to where it looks like Mars. The two distant summits you can see also sticking above the clouds are Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Big Island.
Being above the clouds always looks eerie and beautiful.
Just below the summit are the forests where the native endemic Hawai'ian birds cling to existence. There used to be no mosquitoes on Hawai'i, and when the sailing ships brought them, they also brought avian malaria. Now the native birds only live above 4,000 feet where the mosquitoes don't go.
Descending from the crater, we took a drive through the farming hillsides of southwest Maui. From here you can look down to where our condo was on the coast, and beyond it to northwest Maui.
Looking more southwest towards the uninhabited island of Kaho'olawe. The little speck of land in the sea between is Molokini crater, where we went diving.
There was a winery in the farming area that made conventional wines with grapes, but also made wine from pineapples. I thought the still pineapple wines were a bit much, but the sparkling pineapple wine was really nice, with the dryness balancing out the pineaple so it wasn't so overwhelming.
Back on the coast south of the resort there are more volcanic areas, where lava flows from Haleakala are still exposed.
This is why it's a very long drive from the vineyard to the resort - only about three miles as the crow flies, but no roads make the crossing!
The cinder cone at Makena State Park viewed from Makena Landing Park. We went night diving here and had a gorgeous evening for it.
The northwestern part of Maui is also one of the wettest, with its own set of mountains to form clouds. They were more secretive near the start of our trip, like the first day we were out on the dive boat.
A driving trip around the coast of the northwest peninsula the following day was also pretty cloudy, but the coastline here is dramatically rocky.This is Poelua Bay seen from the Ohai Trail.
At Makaluapuna Point, there's a formation known as the Dragon's Teeth.
And the jagged volcanic rocks just trail away into the sea.
We saved Iao Valley State Park for a less cloudy day, when we could actually see it!
The Iao needle is one of the most photographed places in Maui.
As another illustration of how the weather changed, here's the wetlands seen from the Kealia Coastal Boardwalk a couple of days after I arrived.
And the day we left!
So that was our take on Maui! I have to say, pretty as it was, it's not the Hawai'ian island I'd go back to first. It has a tall volcano and lava flows, just not as tall and dramatic as those on the Big Island. It has beautiful green mountains and valleys, but not as steep and crazy as the ones on Kauai. It has stunning waterfalls just like the ones on Kauai, though I'll admit the ones on Maui are more accessible, it wins there! I'd still go back to Kauai though.
We stayed at a condo village in Wailea next door to the hotel my work conference was in. It cost half as much as the hotel for twice the space and five times the balcony size. Definitely a good pick! The view from it was pleasing too.
There's a beachfront path all through Wailea, which is on the west coast, so each evening we could stroll along to wherever we were eating dinner with views like this:
Or this:
Or sometimes with more cloud, like this:
There was plenty of local wildlife in the condo complex (all except the sea turtles were invasive species of course), like the mongoose.
You didn't need an alarm clock with the grey francolins calling at dawn each day. Those are noisy birds...
We took a trip up to the summit of Haleakala, climbing above the clouds to where it looks like Mars. The two distant summits you can see also sticking above the clouds are Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the Big Island.
Being above the clouds always looks eerie and beautiful.
Just below the summit are the forests where the native endemic Hawai'ian birds cling to existence. There used to be no mosquitoes on Hawai'i, and when the sailing ships brought them, they also brought avian malaria. Now the native birds only live above 4,000 feet where the mosquitoes don't go.
Descending from the crater, we took a drive through the farming hillsides of southwest Maui. From here you can look down to where our condo was on the coast, and beyond it to northwest Maui.
Looking more southwest towards the uninhabited island of Kaho'olawe. The little speck of land in the sea between is Molokini crater, where we went diving.
There was a winery in the farming area that made conventional wines with grapes, but also made wine from pineapples. I thought the still pineapple wines were a bit much, but the sparkling pineapple wine was really nice, with the dryness balancing out the pineaple so it wasn't so overwhelming.
Back on the coast south of the resort there are more volcanic areas, where lava flows from Haleakala are still exposed.
This is why it's a very long drive from the vineyard to the resort - only about three miles as the crow flies, but no roads make the crossing!
The cinder cone at Makena State Park viewed from Makena Landing Park. We went night diving here and had a gorgeous evening for it.
The northwestern part of Maui is also one of the wettest, with its own set of mountains to form clouds. They were more secretive near the start of our trip, like the first day we were out on the dive boat.
A driving trip around the coast of the northwest peninsula the following day was also pretty cloudy, but the coastline here is dramatically rocky.This is Poelua Bay seen from the Ohai Trail.
At Makaluapuna Point, there's a formation known as the Dragon's Teeth.
And the jagged volcanic rocks just trail away into the sea.
We saved Iao Valley State Park for a less cloudy day, when we could actually see it!
The Iao needle is one of the most photographed places in Maui.
As another illustration of how the weather changed, here's the wetlands seen from the Kealia Coastal Boardwalk a couple of days after I arrived.
And the day we left!
So that was our take on Maui! I have to say, pretty as it was, it's not the Hawai'ian island I'd go back to first. It has a tall volcano and lava flows, just not as tall and dramatic as those on the Big Island. It has beautiful green mountains and valleys, but not as steep and crazy as the ones on Kauai. It has stunning waterfalls just like the ones on Kauai, though I'll admit the ones on Maui are more accessible, it wins there! I'd still go back to Kauai though.
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