More Maui Makes Me Merry

Wave on the Hana Coast
Wave on the Hana Coast

Instead of leaving Maui before schedule, I’m going to be staying a few days longer so I can get my SCUBA certification in. The best I could do was a class that starts on Wednesday and ends on Friday. Today (Tuesday) I’m going to drive down the Hana coast and take photos and read my SCUBA book before the class tomorrow. If you know a bit about physics, what you’re required to know isn’t that difficult.

I have to figure out how I can get to Oahu from Molokai. My current plan is to take the ferry from Maui to Molokai. I don’t know if renting a car is possible or worth it on Molokai.

Today I took the extra day of waiting to make the drive up the Hana Coast. Hana is a very small community on the southeastern part of the island, on the slope of Haleakala. Charles Lindberg lived there in the last years of his life and is buried nearby.

Waterfall on the Hana road
Waterfall on the Hana road

The highway showed about 40 miles to Hana when it started. Problem is, that 40 miles consists of nothing but hairpin turns, one lane bridges, and lots of traffic. If you could do 20 mph you’d be lucky. Also, the Dali Lama was in town so traffic pretty bad.

The weather has been very windy the last few days so the surf has been very high. I managed to get some nice photos of the surf.

The highway to Hana had lots of waterfalls and really nice scenic overlooks. I eventually just gave up taking photos of waterfalls and the coast because they all sort of became a blur and the sky was overcast, so the lighting wasn’t very good. Here is the most prominent waterfall I did manage to see along the way.

I eventually worked my way up to the Haleakala National Park visitors center on the coast. They had a waterfall called the Pools of ‘Oheo. Its a stream with two small waterfalls that spill into pools right on the coast.

The Pools of Oheo in Haleakala National Park
The Pools of Oheo in Haleakala National Park

The drive back almost made me dizzy having to go through all the hairpin turns again.

View the entire set of photos from today here.

I’ve also changed how I’m handling my images. First, I’m shooting everything in higher quality RAW files instead of JPEG. We’ll see how this works out and how much storage I have. I’m also not uploading everything to my Flickr account. I’m just going to convert the best photos to JPEG and upload those. This will result in fewer but higher quality images. I might also delete some of the redundant photos in older sets.