I just got back from honeymoon in Hawai'i, so I thought I'd start a trip report / Hawai'i travel thread. I can answer any questions about the trip, and hopefullly others that have been there can chime in with their own experiences, and this thread can serve as a reference to those going in the future.
This first post will be an abbreviated trip report. It was difficult to pare this down to ten photos or so since we took so many (and the pictures don't even do the place justice), but I'll give it a shot:
This was the view off our balcony in West Maui. We spent seven days in a condo that my wife's sister lent us, then three days at
Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel on the Big Island. We didn't get to explore the Big Island as much as we probably should've, as we did a lot of relaxing towards the end of our ten days. But the trip was awesome, and hopefully I'll get to go back every five or ten years or so. After being there, I think the ideal Hawaiian vacation is probably Maui for half the time, then an island you haven't been before for the other half. I think I'd like to do
Kuaui next. The only other really tiny regret I had was not bringing my golf clubs. I thought I wouldn't want to play because I didn't have any friends to play with, but I really wanted to after seeing some of the courses (and weather.) Guess I could've rented. Oh well.
This picture was from a hike through a small bamboo forest at about the 6-mile marker on the
Road to Hana. It was amazing how you could really just go off on your own just about anywhere on the island to explore, be totally secluded from just about any other people, and see such beautiful sights. I guess I'm just used to suburbia where that's impossible. We saw a few waterfalls on this hike too, but I liked the lighting and the direction of the bamboo in this picture, so I chose it for this thread.
These next three pictures are also from the Road to Hana on Maui. This one was just a typical view from the road - high above the water overlooking a peninsula in the distance. I was actually a little nervous before making this trip - everyone I'd talked to about it was like "Yeah, the road
really is pretty dangerous. You need to be careful." And while it wasn't like driving the highway, I never felt like I was cheating death or anything. I was definitely expecting worse. Just drive ~20mph, keep your eyes on the road, be careful when you approach one of the 36 one-lane bridges, and you're fine. At times I wished I was in the passenger seat to enjoy the scenery a little more, but there are pull-offs for many of the better views, and being in the passenger seat would also mean that I'd have to endure six hours of the wife's driving, and much of the road had no guardrail. So I guess I was fine where I was.
Not much to say about this one - I thought the shadows on the branches made it a cool shot. The perspective is a little deceiving though, as we're standing at least 100 feet above the water here, looking down/out over the shrubbery onto the rocks.
This one of the biggest waterfalls we saw. There are so many of them along the Road to Hana, that you really have to pick and choose which ones to pull over and see. Many of them require a short (or not-so-short) walk. This one was called Lower Puohokamoa Falls, and was a couple minutes into the woods at about the 11-mile marker on the road. And again, I'm not sure that this picture does justice to the enormity of the falls. We're looking thousands of feet away, and I'd guess the waterfall is over 200 feet high.
This picture was taken in the town of
Paia in the late afternoon before our dinner at
Mama's Fish House, which I may write about in another post. Paia was a neat little town - seemed kind of hippyish, lots of little surf shops and markets and art galleries - cool place to kill a couple hours. Apparently they're known for their great windsurfing too - something about how the winds blow across the beach rather than perpendicular to the shore. Hawai'i was weird like that, where you'd have very drastic differences in culture, pace of life, and even climate just miles apart. Check out this
rainfall map of Maui. There's literally places that get almost an inch every single day less than 10 miles from areas that get less than an inch of rain a month. In Paia, it rains almost every day, but not very hard. I thought this picture of the rainbow turned out well. Before my trip, I've have said that it looks like someone put a picture of Kansas in the foreground of a Hawai'i picture. But you name it, they have it. Farms, grassy plains, desert-like areas, lush rainforests, lava rock - a little bit of everything. There were actually some really bad wildfires while I was there too that I wish I'd have gotten some better pictures of.
These next four pictures are all sunsets, which probably make the best pictures, though I tried to pick some diverse and interesting ones. The first two, including this one, are from Maui, and next two are from the Big Island. This particular one was at a little dockside bar called Kimo's in Lahiana. Lahaina was probably the most commercial/touristy spot we went in Hawai'i, but there was decent shopping, it had about the only discernable nightlife in the area, and it was about 15 minutes away from were we were staying, so we ended up there a few times. I like the flames in the foreground in this one.
At least for the time being, this is probably my favorite picture I took the whole time. I just love the focus on the clouds and the coloring the sun gives. This was just a sunset taken off our balcony on a random night. The island of Molokai is in the distance on the right side of the photo. There was a raincloud over Molokai 100% of the time. They said that's how explorers back in the days could spot islands from great distances away - they'd just look for the clouds that didn't move. We could see Lanai to the left from our balcony as well, though that island didn't make this picture.
OK, on to the Big Island. These next two sunsets are from Kona. This one was the view off our patio/balcony at the Resort.
Here's another one from the Big Island. This was the view from a place called the Lava Lounge before dinner on our final night. We really had some incredible meals over there, and I'll probably post about a few of them in other posts. We ate at a place called
Pahu i'a after this - the star of Four Seasons' resort on Kona. I took a bunch of pictures there, so I'll definitely post about this meal, and I may do a few others too. Mama's Fish House, which I mentioned earlier, was also wonderful, and we really enjoyed a sushi place called
Sansei, which was on Kapalua's property. It was great value and a lot of fun - I think we got out of there for less than $100, and it seemed like we had tried half the menu by the time we were finished. Two great breakfast we had were at the
Gazebo Restaurant on the shores of Napili Beach, and
The Plantation House, which overlooks the Championship course at Kapalua. Both breakfast spots were actually the same price, down to the penny. I thought the clubhouse at Kapalua was very reasonably priced as well - I'll probably look into staying in that area if/when I go back to Maui in the future.
He we are outside of Lava Lounge / Pahu i'a about an hour before the previous picture. I'll post a mini trip report on that meal in this thread at some point too.
There's a ton of stuff I didn't get to yet either - snorkeling in Honalua Bay was cool (I'd never been snorkeling before), and we also took a boat trip to Molokini Island for more snorkeling. The Aquarium in Ma'alaea was worthwhile. We did a luau in West Maui one night. I skipped over a lot of the Hana stuff, etc. But I guess this is enough for now...