The Road to Hana
Today we woke up extra early so that we could be on the road by 8am to take on the Road to Hana. All our research indicated to us that this was a must-do with many must-see sights. We were expecting spectacular at every turn.
But that would be asking a lot since the Road to Hana has 600+ turns and 50 narrow bridges over its 32 miles. It never occurred to us and never was mentioned in our guidebook how challenging this road might be. After about mile marker 3 the turns came fast, furious, and unrelenting.
The night before our trip, we had highlighted mile markers for stops based upon what was contained in our guidebook. Unfortunately, we ran into a couple of problems with this approach. First, our guidebook was about 3 years out of date. This was enough time for the quality and availability of a sight to have changed. We found in a couple of cases that areas were no longer accessible. Secondly, in many cases we needed to track the location of the site to tenths of a mile beyond a mile marker. Well, our car didn’t have this precision. This made finding a few areas challenging.
Maui has been going through a dry spell of late, so many of the Falls are only a fraction of what they normally are. As such, the payoff was pretty low in almost every case. I do realize we’re still in Hawaii, but the expectations were really high.
What we enjoyed most was the black sand beach which was at mile marker 32. It was as advertised and we lingered there for quite a while and enjoyed lunch.
Unfortunately, if you take the Road to Hana, you must also take the Road back from Hana. So by the end of your drive, you’ve navigated 1200+ turns and over 100 narrow, often single lane bridges. Suzanne was car sick as we neared Hana and managed to beg some dramamine from a well-stocked family and while this helped for a while, she was just barely holding on at the end of the road.
So, bottom line, we don’t think we’ll ever try the Road to Hana again even if we’re here in a more favorable time. The winding roads detract too much from the enjoyment of the sights along the way. We know we’re probably in the minority, but that’s okay. Here’s hoping this balances out the reviews on the Road to Hana and saves someone a vacation day sometime down the line.