Tiwul Serawot Blog: East Maui

By Maree Shogren

The road to Hana was only 60 miles long, but it took us four and a half hours to get to our destination. It was beautiful on that side of the island and not very populated since it was so hard to get to. Unfortunately, we had only planned a day trip and in retrospect should have planned to stay in Hana for at least a couple of days.

We finally reached the parking lot of the Seven Sacred Pools with only a few hours of daylight left and we didn't look forward to driving back on that road in the dark. We decided to hike up to Kupulua Falls first and then visit the pools on the way down. It was a hot, sunny day with a cool ocean breeze so the 1.5 mile hike up into the bamboo forest was delightful after that long, stressful drive. As we ascended into the forest, I was in awe of the bamboo. I'd never been in a bamboo forest before and I was surprised by how dense it was and how quickly it grew. Bamboo can grow up to 3 feet in one day given perfect conditions to do so. It seemed they were 100 feet high. What I found particularly interesting was the way the forest sounded. When gusts of wind blew through the forest the bamboo clanged against each other sounding like giant wooden chimes you'd hear on someone's front porch or a creepy or a creepy wooden dock full of huge old sailing frigates. I loved listening to it, but as the sun started to sink in the sky and the forest got more and more dense the further we went up...I started to get a little frightened. I think a bamboo forest after dark on a windy night would be a very creepy place to be.

There were many pools to investigate along the way and the trail started to take on a more groomed look with the addition of stairways and boardwalks. There were even livestock gates we had to go through and be sure to close behind us so that none of the cows would get loose. The falls were 400 feet straight up a cliff wall, but Hawaii was experiencing a drought when we were there so there wasn't much water coming from the falls. It was a serene place for a quick break before we decided to head back down the trail. Sunset was still coming, after all.

When I had gone to Maui before, the Seven Sacred Pools were much more full, and I had even jumped off a cliff into the main pool which was overflowing into the ocean. There were warnings to be sure not to get sucked out to sea because of a shark's den under that opening. On this day the water level was far lower and if you jumped from the cliff, you would undoubtedly bump your noggin, or worse. Since daylight was dwindling, we decide not to take a dip and to head back to the other side of island. For some reason the traffic was considerably lighter, probably the fear of impending darkness, so Adam was able to race back to the hotel an hour and a half faster than on the way in. That's a big difference for a 40 mile drive, especially considering we never stopped for photos on the longer drive!

There's a beach at the end of the road in Makena, appropriately called 'Big Beach , that we had heard about. It was pretty crowded when we went to check it out so we decided to venture where most people were not going to go. There was a smaller beach just past Big Beach where we parked and then walked down a trail along the coast for a half mile until we reached the lava flows. Apparently, the lava flows were only a couple hundred years old and we were walking on the same trails that King Kamehameha had walked on not so long ago. The area was rampant with wild goats. They got around really well considering the terrain was so inhospitable.

It was a pretty hot day, and the heat emanating from the black lava felt like I was being scorched. You could see heat waves in every direction. We were looking for a private beach aptly called 'The Oasis” which was supposed to be about another 2 miles on the flows. We were trying to follow the markers in a guide book that we had borrowed from a friend, but the markers were hard to find.

Finally, we were starting to walk by an area with palm trees all around it by the coast and we could hear the waves crashing. We made our way down to the beach and it truly was an oasis. Because of the high surf warnings during our stay, we weren't able to go in the water very much, but this oasis had a perfect breakwater – lava. The beach was fairly small with white sand, but you couldn't walk barefoot because of the pricker bushes that had littered the beach with unpleasantly large thorns. The bushes, a plague on the island, were introduced by insane missionaries. They were so misguided about reality that they though it would be a good idea to plant thorn trees all over the island for the sole reason of getting the native Hawaiians to start wearing clothes.

We were in our own little cove with the breakwater where the waves would come, bounce of off the cove walls and then again off of the breakwater, so you got two waves for the price of one! It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of energy to expel while not trying to killed by the waves. We spent a good amount of time there before heading back on the lava which seemed especially hot after our cool sojourn. I noticed that a lot of plastic Nike emblems from the back of tennis shoes littered the trail on the way back. The sharp lava made my shoes a little worse for wear too. We also had the pleasure of witnessing some nude sunbathers who thought they had some privacy...or maybe not.