West Maui and Lahaina

On our second day in Maui, Shawn's super awesome camera died! This is the camera that we used on our honeymoon in Jamaica, and it's also been taken on every vacation in the last two years, as well as countless hiking, biking, and snowshoeing trips. It's supposed to be waterproof, shockproof, and freezeproof. We didn't have a single bit of trouble until we were in Maui, and then all of a sudden, it decided it didn't want to be waterproof anymore.

Fortunately, the memory card still worked just fine, and we discovered that the Walmart on the island carried the current version of the same camera. So on Wednesday of our trip, we drove up to Kahului to buy a new camera. It was obviously an unexpected expense, but there was no way I was going to go with no pictures for the rest of our trip!

Our plan for Wednesday had been to visit the town of Lahaina. According to about.com, when Kamehameha I conquered the island of Maui in 1794, he made the town of Lahaina the capital of the kingdom. It was the capital of Hawaii until 1840, when Honolulu became the capital. Since we needed to start our day in Kahului, Shawn and I decided to drive around the western part of the island. According to our map, there was a road that would go all the way around, and we figured it would be scenic.

It was definitely scenic...it was also a bit scary! The road around the west side of Maui has stretches that are not paved, and large portions of the road are so narrow that there is no center line painted...the road is technically too narrow for two complete lanes. The road hugs the sides of hills/mountains, and like many mountain roads, the outside lane of the road ends in a drop-off. There were some places on the road that had fences...although we did notice a few "car-sized" holes in these fences! There were long stretches of road that didn't have any kind of fence or guardrail at all. Oh, and did I mention that the road was very curvy? Plenty of places where you really had no idea if there might be a car coming around the bend towards you...that you wouldn't really have room to pass. But boy...it was pretty!

This picture was taken just outside the town of Kahakuloa. The only thing I could see in the town was a house or two, and a guy selling fresh pineapple from a roadside stand. We both regret not stopping to buy some pineapple.

We stopped at one place where Shawn had read about some tidepools. We walked down a fairly well-established trail that went right past a big sign saying not to go any further because it was dangerous. That, of course, made me nervous, but we took a picture and kept on walking. :) Really, it was perfectly safe. This was the first view we saw of the waves crashing on the lava rocks.
We did eventually make our way down to the tide pools. Unlike the tidepools that I've been to, which are created by water left in pools when the tide goes out, these tidepools were basically made by waves crashing over the lava rocks...and these are the pools that are left behind. I stayed out of reach of the sea spray...Shawn climbed down to the pools. He took this picture of me from the pool area (I'm wearing an orange tank top...see me?). Although it was interesting to see how the pools had been formed, Shawn said there really wasn't much life in the pools that he could see. Basically just some small fish and some crabs.

After the tide pools, we did stop at one or two other scenic overlooks, but the drive was taking longer than we had imagined, and we did eventually want to make it to Lahaina.

Once we got to Lahaina, it was late enough that our only real stop was for dinner. We stopped at an excellent restaurant called the Aloha Mixed Plate. You can read the story of the restaurant here. The menu was pretty traditional, with most of the items being Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Filipino. We both got "mixed plate" meals, which were really good! And yes, I even tried Poi. (I'm not really a fan.) In addition to the great food, we loved our dining experience. This picture below is the closest this restaurant gets to "indoor" seating.

And the restaurant is right next to Lahaina Harbor, so this was our view during dinner:

I'm not sure if you can really see it from the picture, but the sun is setting over the island of Lana'i. After dinner, we drove back to the condo...so it turned out to be a pretty full day!