Day 5 of Honeymoon

Day 5 was the fabled Road to Hana! Descriptions of this road just don't do it justice, but I'll try to describe it to the best of my ability. Seth and I woke up fairly early since it was going to take us an hour just to get to the beginning part of the road. The road starts a little after Paia and, like all roads in the middle of nowhere, that's where the mile markers start over and aren't always exactly a mile a part from each other.

The road is one of those roads that's both narrow and windy. It hugs the coastline (up a cliff) and is surrounded by rock and trees. Basically, it was the scariest road I've ever driven on. Every bridge was a "one lane bridge" where you had to yield to on-coming traffic. Also, half the drive was so narrow, that you'd have to stop and try to pull over if you met on-coming traffic. But the views! The views were gorgeous and there were a lot of water falls and scenic spots.

Beginning of the Hana drive (where the roads are still good)

Random stop for pictures

Look how lush it is here!

Ke'anae Arboretum

Ching's Pond

Upper Waikani Falls (a.k.a Three Bears)

Us in front of the Three Bears

More Waterfalls

This was taken on a road off of the Hana Highway

After probably 3 hours (or more) on the road and a few pit stops to swim, take pictures, explore, and buy some banana bread, we finally made it to Hana! You could tell you were in Hana because the road suddenly stopped veering every which-way and became straight for maybe three miles. Plus it turned back into two lanes, which was a welcome relief. In Hana, we stopped at the Wai'anapanapa State Park to check out their Black Sand Beach.

View of Wai'anapanapa State Park

Us!

Lava tube on the Black Sand Beach

Other end of Lava Tube

Black Sand (volcanic rock) - it actually looked a lot darker in person

Once we had thoroughly worn out our visit in Hana, we decided to move on. We wanted to at least hit the Seven Sacred Pools past Hana before having to turn back. That was about 10 miles away, and luckily the roads past Hana didn't seem quite as terrible as the roads leading into Hana.

Seven Sacred Pools

Lower portion of the pools

Upper portion of the pools

I took a quick swim at the Seven Sacred Pools, and then we packed up our stuff to head back home. We wanted to leave before it started to get dark because I thought the drive on the Hana Highway would probably be even worse in the dark and I was worried about driving it at night. Unfortunately, even though we were now on the southern half of the east portion of Maui, we had to go back the way we came instead of continuing. On the most southern portion, there's an expanse of road that's supposedly one lane for five miles and unpaved and rental cars weren't supposed to drive it. That meant that instead of going maybe 20 miles back to the central part of Maui, we had to turn around and go back the way we came, roughly 50 miles back around. Driving back didn't seem quite as bad as driving to Hana, maybe because I was impatient to get home, maybe because I was a little more reckless. In either case, it only ended up taking two hours from Hana to get back to Paia (two hours to drive roughly 40 miles, not bad!).