My wife Liz and I were set to take our first vacation in two years. We we excited for a relaxing getaway to the land of sunshine and rainbows. We were...totally unprepared.
Our plans might have would have worked, if only we hadn't need to eat, drink, or drive anywhere during our trip.
These, and other minor details, follow below:
Day 1:
Our arriving flight into Maui is late, which is a problem because I had to rent a car from some random Hawaiian guy rather than a rental car company. You see, rental car companies were overrun due to the influx of tourists, so the cost of a car rental was going to be more than our hotel and flights combined. Instead, we rented a car through Turo, a company where private people rent their extra car for a few days, like people do for their vacation houses on Airbnb. I didn't consider that having a 4:00 car reservation meant that I would need to meet a guy at the airport at 4 p.m. on the dot. Enterprise doesn't care if you make a reservation for 4:00 and show up at 5:00, but the guy waiting in the airport parking lot might just turn around and go home. Our plane lands at 3:50, so I dash off the plane to get our car while my wife gets the luggage.
As I arrive to our meeting spot, I get a text from the driver that he got caught in traffic and will be late.
That was our week in a nutshell. We could have just turned around and gone home then.
We decided not to do that, but to instead go out for dinner. That proved harder than we expected when every restaurant near us was booked for the night. We finally find one with a 30-45 wait and asked to be put on the list. We get a table much more than 45 minutes later, but that moment of good fortune quickly dissipates once we meet our waiter. He checks in on the tables next to us three times before acknowledging our presence, but what he lacked in eagerness he made up for in incompetence.
I ordered a drink, which didn't arrive. A few minutes later, we ordered an appetizer, which arrived at the same time as our food. I remind him of my drink order at that point, and he proceeds to bring me a different drink than what I had ordered. When I mentioned the discrepancy, he gave me the type of apology you'd fully expect from someone who was probably high and would rather be surfing. He didn't offer to fix the problem, but he did take a full three dollars off our bill for serving me an $8 beverage that I didn't enjoy.
I remembered this act of service when calculating his tip.
Day 2:
My favorite thing about Hawaii, at least in Oahu and Kauai, it's such an easy place to be. The water is blue, rainbows are everywhere, and the people are friendly. The beaches there are easy too. Across the street from the beautiful beaches are clean public restrooms, and stores with every beach essential, and restaurants with abundant carry-out food options. Unlike the beaches on the Gulf Coast where I grew up, you don't have to to pack for the entire day before you go.
Maui didn't seem to get this memo.
As a first stop, we walk to the beach across the street from our condo complex. It was fine enough, but the water isn't especially pretty and there are no bathrooms or other services nearby. We spend a few hours but decide to move on to one of the beaches our guidebook recommended. The island is full of tourists, so a five-mile drive take 20 minutes. As we begin to wonder if we missed our beach, a small sign directing us down a dirt road. I promised the guy from whom we rented the car that I wouldn't offroad, but I was assuming that I would have a choice.
The beach had crystal blue water, gold sand, and some nice waves, but it starts to get hot after a few hours. Our drinks are dry and we start to get hungry. The beach has no services nearby except for a food truck with 10 people in line, so we drive back to our condo. We call around and can't find dinner reservations, so we make sandwiches at home. Our television doesn't work, but at least our hosts left us a bottle of wine.
We had to make dinner reservations at 5:00 in order to get in anywhere, so we enjoy dinner a nice dinner with the Golden Girls. I want to see the sunset over the ocean, so we hang around until 6:30, when the sun proceeds to set directly into a cloud and never return.
Day 3:
We need a break from the heat and hassle of the beaches, so we decide to see some historic sites. A 2,100 mountain that is shaped like a green Washington monument rises over a rain forest down the road. In local folklore, the mountain was thought to be a certain aroused body part of the god who ruled the realm. In present day, it serves as inspiration for a lot of jokes from tourists.
The mountain is lush and beautiful, and people swim in the natural streams flowing down from it, and I hear no jokes about the source of the flowing liquid. The hike along the mountain is gorgeous, with the possible exception of the moments where we walked behind large people wearing thong bathing suits. This is frequent event in Hawaii that takes some time to get used to. We were there for a week, so apparently it takes longer than that. The scenery changes about a mile in and we were suddenly in the rain forest, which is not a sentence that I've ever typed before. It was wild. Literally.
On the way home, we set our GPS to take us to a set of historic temple ruins in the same general area. Instead, our GPS takes us to a strip mall. We feel unsatisfied with this result--the strip mall didn't even seem very old. Our check with our guidebook, which locates the ruins at an intersection in what turns out to be a residential neighborhood down the road. When we pull up on the street curb in front of house, we see a gated driveway next to it with a "Do Not Enter" sign posted and few local dogs who look angered by our presence.
The logical thing would have been to turn around at that point, but we were so confused as to the actual location of this can't-miss historic site that we drove around in vain for a few minutes. When we found nothing, we eventually parked by the locked by the gate once more to see if it offered any clues. On closer inspection, the gate had signs reading both, "No Trespassing, Secure Government Facility" and "Pedestrians Only." This seemed contradictory. Might the sign suggest that pedestrians would not be considered trespassers? That was what I was prepared to tell the authorities, if we got caught.
We walked around the gate and up a driveway to a peak overlooking the mountains in one direction and the shore on the other. The remains of a temple and three rock structures overlooked it all, with stunning views in all directions as far as the eye can see. I could see why the natives found the site sacred. I did too.
I took comfort in the fact that the site had a few placards posted--at least at one point this site had been open to the public. I reason that the gate was probably meant just to keep cars from driving up to the site, as the asphalt was no longer in good shape. At least that was what I was prepared to tell the authorities.
But I stopped worrying about the car, or getting arrested, as we looked in solitude over the miles in front of us, I felt the power of 800 years worth of prayers being offered up from the site. I quieted my mind and said my own. I felt that God there with me, and I asked God not to leave since I needed divine help to get back to my car without being arrested or attacked by angry dogs.
God obliged, but it was the last favor we would get.
Day 4:
Maui is famous for its Road to Hana, a winding 50-mile scenic drive along its coastal wilderness. We made the drive four years ago when we were on the island for a day, and found it somewhat overrated. But we decided to go back because my wife wanted to get back to the black sand beach near the roads end, and I was interested in visiting another set of ruins near it that we had missed the first time. The drive is full of sharp turns and takes several hours, but it is broken up by some roadside stands selling exotic fruits and exotic snacks like pineapple bread and dragon fruit. The sights on the road seemed prettier this time, but more exhausting. I could never find room to pull over at any of the popular overlooks or fruit stands to break up the trip.
When we finally get to the black sand beach at the end of the road, I'm ready to relax as we pull up at our beach. We arrive and an attendant asks us if we have reservations.
We did not have reservations for the public beach. We did not, because it seems less than obvious that reservations to access public land would be required. For instance, we did not have reservations to drive the public road. We also did not have reservations to listen to the radio. We also did not have reservations to view the sun light or breath the air. Why on Earth would we need reservations to be on a piece of public land that is free to access?
I did not think of these points at the time, so I informed the attendant that we had driven two hours to get to this closed beach, and that they could perhaps better publicize the need for reservations.
"We just started requiring them," the attendant said, as though this somehow made the situation better.
"We just want to see the beach," I said. "If we find somewhere else to park, can we walk up to it?"
"No, I'm afraid any access to the beach requires reservations, even if you don't park here."
"Do you enforce that rule on the seals?"
"Well, no."
"If a boat were to sink at sea and the survivors were to attempt to swim up to this shore, would you force them to drown because they didn't have a reservation?"
She didn't respond. That was probably because I didn't actually say the last part out loud. But I really wished I would have. Instead, we turned around and drove back home. We're exhausted and would love to veg on a few hours of tv to wind down, but our tv still doesn't work.
Day 5:
One of my favorite things in life is to watch a sunset directly over the ocean. This can only happen if the sun sets to the West, which for Americans, means the Pacific Ocean. We had missed out the first four days either because it was cloudy or because an offshore island blocked the view. We had booked a sunset sail cruise on night five, so that we could finally see it.
We didn't have much time before the cruise. Our day got off to a late start because we spent too much time looking for a specific entrance to a beach. Beaches in Maui sometimes stretch for miles and have multiple entrances from the main highway, only some of which have restrooms. We spent much of the morning looking for the one entrance with restrooms, only to eventually give up and park at of the others. After walking from the lot to the beach through sand that must have measured 5,000 degrees, we found a spot. We got to enjoy it for a full half hour, before my weak MS-deficient bladder needed a bathroom. I held out as long as I could, but we soon had to trudge back through the surface of the sun to get to our car.
After a pit stop at our condo, we had a couple of free hours, where we drove toward a different beach that we also couldn't find. We went to the intersection our books described and didn't see any signs for it. We turned into a big parking lot near the intersection, but it turned out to be for a shopping center. We turned into another driveway that led only to a hotel. We made a couple of U-turns in the area, thankful that at least this time there were no angry dogs. As we gave up and started the drive home from the opposite direction, we passed a sign for the beach. It was nice, and we enjoyed the roughly 16 minutes we had there before having to leave for our cruise.
We got to the dock and spent 20 minutes trying to decipher where we could legally park, which seems to be a sacrifice the native powers require to access anything on the island. We got to our boat and enjoyed a lovely cruise, where we saw the sun set directly over that same distant island that had blocked our view from shore. At least it didn't rain.
Day 6:
A tour of Maui's only working pineapple plantation was our big plan for the day. The tour books up weeks in advance, and we were only able to get in because of a cancellation at 11:45 a.m., which limited any other plans for the day. We arrived to the island's only public pineapple farm early and explored its gardens and had a nice coffee at their cafe. It was a lovely morning, until I overheard an employee tell a customer that their first tour of the day left at noon.
Out of an abundance of caution, I pulled up my 11:45 tickets to make sure we were in the right place. My tickets had a time and a QR code to scan, but no other information. After I dug through several emails, I finally found one with an address for the tour company. I plugged the address into my GPS, and it was 20 minutes away, with no business associated with the address. I showed an employee my QR code and asked if I was in the right place for my tour, or if there was another pineapple farm that hosted tours.
"I don't know," he said. "We do a train tour." And then he turned away and stared ruefully at the floor wishing that marijuana would materialize.
I eventually found a number on a confirmation email and called it to confirm that the pineapple tour didn't actually leave from the pineapple farm.
"No, the agent said, this is a bus tour."
"We went to the pineapple farm and can't be at your location until almost noon," I said, "is there any place we can meet the bus?"
"No," the agent said. "But if you come here you can pick up your complimentary pineapples."
We drove to the tour office and picked up our pineapples, which is all each of us got for our $75 tickets. We learned that the tour we had booked didn't access the famous and ornate complex we had just left but a private farm in the woods.
We decided to drive to the North side of the island to see the beaches up there, but there was a massive accident and we got stuck in standstill traffic for an hour. Eventually we gave up near the harbor we had departed from the night before and found a nice lunch overlooking the water. Once the traffic died down, we drove up to the North coastline, and found appetizers and drinks overlooking the water. It was a gorgeous end to a rough day.
When we got home, we tried one of our $75 pineapples, and it wasn't very good.
Day 7:
Our plan was to drive to the top of the volcano, a 10,000-foot climb. The guidebooks warned that the the drive down was more treacherous than the drive up, as drivers sometimes lost control of their cars on the steep decline. Given all that had gone wrong this trip, I began to lose my nerve.
I looked up some online forums for reassurance. I googled how bad the drive was, and got a mix of opinions ranging from "terrifying" to "it's fine, but make sure to put your car in low gear." None of this feedback was reassuring, as our rented car with automatic transmission had nothing resembling a lower gear than "drive." I pictured running a stranger's car into the edge of cliff on the last day of our trip, and asked to call an audible and return to our favorite beach instead--the one with road signs and parking.
The actual beach was good too, of course. Crystal blue waves tossed giant sea turtles and surfers around alongside each other, while we enjoyed the breeze. It started raining a few minutes after we arrived, but we waited in our cars and the sun eventually came out. We stayed a few hours, until the sun got too intense. We finished the day by finally discovering a good happy hour, a local market with delicious pineapple bread, and some refreshing Hawaiian snowballs.
We stayed for one last shot at the sunset. The colors were pretty, but from every location we tried, another island blocked our direct view.
We flew home the next day, and returned to adult life. A sick elderly kitty awaited us, along with a couple of bills (with mistakes in favor of the billing entity), medical offices who won't return calls, and job stresses. After a few days, I was wishing for problems like blocked sunsets and overpriced pineapples.
It wasn't the best trip, but I don't blame Hawaii (except for the lack of road signs). Hawaii was the most obvious way to have an exotic trip this year, and the rest of the country had the same idea. Given our mental energy, or lack thereof, we should have gone to an island that we knew better.
We never did get quite the sunset I wanted--the one spectacular one I've seen from Hawaii many times before. But the partially blocked sunset view we got was still prettier from the one I have at home.
And most importantly, I didn't need a reservation to see it.
