Maui June 2010

These are pics from our trip to Hana. This side of the island is a rain forest with TONS of greenery everywhere. There is nothing that doesn't have something growing on it. All the buildings are rusted where there is metal. The side of the island we were staying on was call scrubland and it didn't look much different from home. They had to water their grass and landscape with automatic sprinklers too. I thought that was interesting. The first pic is of Molikini. This is a caldera. A volcano that has sank into the ocean. It looks so cool. The next one and down a bit, these are pictures of catholic churches that sprang up when the missionaries came over. The only thing is that along with arrival of the white man also came arrival of many diseases. These churches are built in the middle of nowhere. You are driving along and all of sudden there is a church. Nothing around it. Just it. They said that when these churches were built there were tons of little town developments all over the place but that disease wiped out quite a lot of natives. Then you see TONS of bamboo. This was on the hike to the reason you drive to Hana, the falls. The waterfall was pretty cool but this bamboo forest was amazing! It was super thick as you can see. The bamboo is an invasive species that overgrows everything so they are trying to keep it isolated to this place on Maui.I thought Maui was famous for its black sand beach. We this was it. There was one and it was about 50 feet long. The neatest part about this beach was that around it were a lot of caves made through the volcanic rock and the waves were so powerful because we were on the North shore. We could barely hear each other talk.
The single story building is a school. I had to get a pic of that to show the kids that they should be grateful. Then you see the pic of the tree with the florescent-colored bark. Those were neat. I have tons more pics that hopefully I will get to sooner than later. Enjoy!















When the white men came to the island of Maui, they grew sugar cane. It is really yucky by the way. There are tons of fields of sugar cane but there is only 1 refinery left.

This was our excursion to the top of the volcano Haleakala. The summit was 10,023 feet and we traveled from 0 feet above sea level so it was quite a journey. The thing about Maui that was not the best was that it took a really long time to drive to any of the sites. Hana took us all day. This took us all day but the volcano was amazing. There are 2 species that live on this volcano mountain side that live no where else on the world. The plant you see below is call the Silver Strand. They are basically almost extinct because the earlier settlers didn't know their roots were close to the top of the ground so when they would step next to them it would smash their roots. These plants were recorded at high at 6 feet tall. They bloom once in their lifetime and then die. There is also a bird that nest in the rocky outcrops of this volcano. It lays 1 egg once a year. It was really fun learning so much about all this stuff. There was an observatory on top of Haleakala for Nasa and the Department of Defense. It is closed to the public.





If you can't see it this sign says "Narrow winding road". This was such and UNDER statement. The roads to Hana were so narrow! All of the bridges were 1 lane and there were so many bends. The locals drove around these turns 50 miles an hour. Scary.


This is a little house on our way to the North side of the island to visit Hana.

This was the Whaler's Village. Of course we had to visit the jail. I LOVE history.

This was just below the lighthouse on our way to our condo.


Cory eating at our favorite restaurant EVER. It was at the Aquarium.