The Road to Hana is a famed Maui attraction. Winding for 52 miles from Kahului, it passes over 46 one lane bridges, and has over 600 curves.
It basically runs up and down the gulches throughout east Maui, with many of the gulches featuring waterfalls.
It was raining fairly hard as we made our way down this early morning, so some of the falls were more impressive than normal. The good news was our early start meant we missed most of the very slow tourist traffic on the way down.
Unfortunately unless you had a 4WD high clearance vehicle you had to come back the same way, which we did later that afternoon.
Eventually we reached Hana, and continued on to the portion of Haleakala National Park that is on the ocean. As we passed into the park grounds we were met with another great waterfall.
Our main destination for the day was the Pipiwai Trail.
This trail takes you up the mountain past the Seven Sacred Pools.
Through an amazing bamboo forest.
After clearing the bamboo forest you are presented with the highlight – the 400′ high Waimoku Waterfalls.
After returning back down the trail we started backtracking up Hana Highway. Just beyond Hana is the Wai’anapanapa State Park.
The seas were angry that day, and the waves were high and frequent.
The blowhole at the park was more impressive than any of the others we saw elsewhere.
Even the birds seemed excited.
As we continued our journey back to Kahului we passed an area where numerous cars were parked along the road. Following the others we made our way down to an overlook where everyone was checking out the waves.
They were reported to be 20-30′ high here, which brought out locals as well as the tourists.
The only surfboards we saw that day were lining the parking lot of the shops.
As we made our way back to the hotel for the night we passed this architecturally interesting temple. We were fortunate that despite quite a bit of rain we remained dry for our couple hours of hiking, as well as the visit to the state park.
RDZ Photography 