Driving the Road to Hana
High on our list of “Must Do” Maui adventures was the fabled Road to Hana (HI-360)- a gorgeous 52-mile automobile trek along the rugged northern side of the island of Maui with scenic views of the ocean on one side, and lush, tropical foliage on the other, dotted, every few miles with dozens of waterfalls.
With our bodies still on Maryland time, we were up at the crack of dawn, downed a hearty breakfast, and set off for the road to Hana, about an hour from our condo on Maui’s west side.
It was nearly 8 a.m. when we reached Paia, the last civilization before beginning the official drive, and we were certainly not the first tourist vehicle (commercial or private) headed down the road. Grace really had done her research on the best stops along our drive, and we hit a scenic overlook for a BSP (Brief Stop for Photo), then about a mile further down the road we parked for a hike to a little waterfall. Refueled with some banana and pineapple smoothies and hopped back in the car. So far so good.
There is one small catch, however – the road itself. Generously credited in most travel guides as being a two-lane road, it is more often than not a 1 ½ lane road, devolving to a single lane over more than 59 stone bridges along the way. Sometimes we found cars randomly parked alongside the road, not to mention the wild chickens and roosters flapping and clucking at us as we went by.
But wait, there’s more…
To make things just a little bit more interesting, the narrow, winding, road to Hana is made up of over 600 hairpin turns, many of them around a blind curve, so that one must honk their horn to alert drivers coming the other direction, that they might want to get as close to the cliff’s edge as possible because we were already hugging the rock face on the inside of the turn. The good news is that this white knuckled driving keeps the speed low – 10 – 15 mph in most places.
At times, it is hard to know which direction to look; beauty is all around you and danger lurks at every hairpin turn. (Of course, if you are driving it is best to look at the road.) There is the danger that all of that beauty starts to get old, especially to our Camp Daddy crowd. (You can only say: “Look at that ocean view!” or “Hey, a beautiful waterfall!” so many times) While music calms savage beasts, our boys are calmed by audio books, especially the Magic Tree House collection. So when they got a little antsy, we turned down the Hawaiian music, turned up Jack and Annie’s latest historic, time-travelling adventure, and admired the tropical rainforests and beautiful landscapes as we passed by.
The return trip
To be honest, we spent only a couple of minutes in Hana itself. We were anxious to avoid doing the return trip in the dark so we gave the quiet town a quick look and headed back again.
Recommendation
There are some big waterfalls beyond Hana in Kipahulu that we missed because we were worried about getting back in daylight. It would have been ideal to spend a night in Hana, explore the town and the waterfalls beyond, and then have another day to explore on the trip back. (The roads beyond Hana are, supposedly, quite a bit more challenging -- some even requiring 4-wheel drive to get past.)
If you want to do it in a day, we would recommend stopping as little as possible until you reach Hana, or the Kipahulu waterfalls, or whatever is your farthest point. Then stop all you want on the return drive. That would allow you to gage the time and enjoy more stops without worrying about what you are missing around the next curve.
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