The Road to Hāna

The following is an excerpt from a jaunt along Maui's famous east coast: the Road to Hāna. The preceding should be said with an almost reverential hush, emphasizing "Hāna" like it's Xanadu or some other earthly paradise, only with less syllables. It is meant to serve as a travel guide in conjunction with a book you actually pay for in an actual bookstore with some tips and tricks for getting around... The Road to Hāna.

The thing that will get you, when traveling along the Road to Hāna, is when they reset the mile markers back to zero when Route 36 turns, without too much hullaballoo, into Route 360. The weight of this particular change will not really settle down into the pit of your stomach until much, much later, however.

The Road to Hana

To ensure you have the best possible experience on the road to Hāna, make sure you bring along the following things:

A car - This comes in extremely handy, as hitchhiking, walking, or unicycling this road may prove hazardous to your health
A lunch - For as many people as you're driving with, obviously. You're going to get hungry. And you are not a skilled enough fisherman to spear fish out of roadside pools. Unless you host one of those fishing programs. In which case, I'm sure you don't need advice on much, anyway. If you are someone else, you can get a lunch in Pā'ia. The lunch box place next to the Chevron station is a pretty good place to stock up.
A traveling companion who can sing - as you won't be able to receive any radio stations from around mile... well, at a random guess, mile 9 and will continue for the remaining four hours of your drive to Hāna and back again to Pā'ia. This length of time will be slightly longer if the aforementioned traveling companion gets carsick on long, windy drives and you have to drive really, really slowly. When you do receive a radio station on your way back towards Pā'ia, it will more likely than not be Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion doing a bit about a snowman, which is what surreal looks like in the dictionary. Well, that and add in a penguin. That's surreal.
Some cash - One of the most remote roads on the planet, and there are still things out there that will charge you money along it.

A lot of travel guides will tell you the Road to Hāna is one of the top ten things to do in Maui. It's a beautiful, picturesque drive through bamboo forests along a windy road chased by clouds from the volcano just landward, which really does look like you have the option of going todasci or totace, heaven-ward or hell-ward into the seas that crash against Maui's north shore.

But before you even technically begin the journey you will be nodding your head along with the preceding when you visit Baldwin Beach. Baldwin Beach looks exactly like pictures you've seen promoting Hawai'i as the ultimate tourist destination. It's a beautiful light sand beach with some occasionally vicious waves and the bluest water you've ever seen, even if you've taken a bowl of water and put bright blue dye in it and mixed up some pretty blue water. This is bluer. Trust me.

The beach is on the left, heading towards Hāna (which will be a theme in this piece from now on). around the 6 mile marker on Route 36, before you even hit Pā'ia, which is traditionally, for me, at least, considered the precursor to the Road to Hāna.

If you like swimming without all the awkwardness of drowning when the undertow sucks you out to sea, I highly recommend heading down the beach to the right, as you're facing the ocean, past the lifeguard's hut, until you get to the little portion of the beach that's protected by a reef about a hundred or so feet out. At the very least, if you get sucked out to sea by the undertow you'll hit the reef and be able to crawl, if your scarred and broken body will allow it, along the reef and back in to the rocks connecting the reef to the beach. Be sure to take lots of pictures, people are bound to tell you it looks exactly like they've seen in travel brochures for Hawai'i.

And on that note, a quick sidebar, for those of you who may struggle with conversations. Talking about your holiday can be fun and exciting. However, if it's too fun and exciting for you you may just rifle through the two hundred and seven points you wanted to make about your holiday and be left with lots of what we call "dead air" while you sit around with these people you'd expected to regale with stories of your vacation. What I suggest is that you start out, when the subject of vacations comes up, and your vacation in particular, that you casually start off with this: "Oh, we went to Hawai'i." (If you went on your own now may be an excellent time to start using the royal 'we' to add heft and meat to your stories.) Not only does this dive right into the exciting and fun experience that is going to Hawai'i, you have then left the door open for your conversational partner(s) to ask, "Oh, how nice. Which island did you go to?" And while this isn't grammatically correct, it suits, and off you go, you've just gotten at least one interchange between you and your conversational partner(s), which is the start to a regaling like you've never held, even if you follow up with the sparse yet factually correct "Maui."

Once you've had your fill of Baldwin Beach, it's on to Pā'ia, where we really get going... on the Road. To Hāna.

To be continued...

Summary

disclaimer:

For more on Maui and their interesting todasci/totace directions ("to the sky" and "to the sea", for those not up on hyperfiction-speak), you might want to read Michael Joyce's hyperfiction The Sonatas of Saint Francis.

Or just tune in next week, when we'll give you more of what you're clamorin' for. You just wait and see.

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31 Jan, 2005

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