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My wife Fawn and I are city folk. We have always lived in cities, and when we travel, we usually spend some of our time in cities and some of our time in the country. For example, when we visit Fawn’s family in Vietnam, which we have done several times, we usually divide our stay [...]
Written by Travel News on August 22nd, 2009 with
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My wife Fawn and I are city folk. We have always lived in cities, and when we travel, we usually spend some of our time in cities and some of our time in the country. For example, when we visit Fawn’s family in Vietnam, which we have done several times, we usually divide our stay equally between Saigon and the Mekong Delta. Occasionally we enjoy a day on the beach at Vung Tau or Nha Trang, where, as is the custom in Vietnam, we recline on chaises lounges in the shade of striped umbrellas. We are not really beach people.
Until a month ago, we didn’t have a beach towel to our names.
On the Oaxacan Coast a few years ago, we avoided the beach. The bay we stayed near was the terminus of a trash-clogged stream that had been flushed by a recent storm. We found accommodation in a humble hillside cabana in a dramatic jungle setting crawling with lizards and snakes. We did our bathing in an oversized swimming pool.
Our city kids become natural-born swimmers on Maui
On our first trip to Hawaii, long ago, we went to Honolulu to visit my wife’s sister, whose baby boy was being treated in a military hospital there. We took a day trip to Waimea Bay to watch the surfers, and we did a little snorkeling on Hanauma Bay, where the beach scenes of Elvis’ Blue Hawaii were shot. There were days when we visited the Bishop Museum or strolled through Chinatown, and didn’t dip a toe into the ocean (though it always seemed to be within view).
We have kids now, and our kids are city kids. They are hardy walkers and can hike up and down hills on weekend excursions, but to them wildlife primarily consists of squirrels, raccoons, and the mourning doves that roost in the eves of the apartment building next door. At about the age of five each developed the habit of informing me that killer whales are really orcas, but none could differentiate between a parrot fish and a saddleback wrasse. I have long suspected they are more comfortable in winter coats than in swim suits.
When we began entertaining thoughts of a trip to Hawaii the idea was a little daunting to me. In old family vacation photos, my Irish aunts and uncles sit on beaches in coats and scarves, their smiles faintly visible in the deep shadows of floppy hats. They obviously knew, or at least feared, what harm the sun was capable of inflicting.
It is possible that the only point of the photos was to warn future generations of the family. If so, I failed to get the message. At about the age of 17 I fell asleep one afternoon next to a swimming pool. After an hour I awoke badly burned, and within a day’s time I was driven about as near to insanity as I have ever been. My skin was overcome with a sizzling, universal itch and my brain began to ring with a searing panic. I felt like a dog being attacked by thousands of fleas. A good friend warned me not to scratch. It would only make it worse. I asked him to kill me.
My misgivings about the sun unleashed deeper fears founded purely on themselves. What we were considering here wasn’t just a break from work, or the daily grind. It was a departure from reality. All that time, so little to do, apart from sip mai thais and shift my towel periodically to keep up with the moving shadow of a palm tree. It may sound like heaven to you, but it sounded like limbo to me. In my darker moments, which admittedly come a little too often, I worried that a week of mindless relaxation on a beach might be like inserting a vacuum cleaner into my skull – or, worse, into the mysterious, hard-to-find cavity in which my soul resides.
Maui seemed suspiciously easy. It could be reached in five hours via a non-stop flight from San Francisco, on the airline that awards me bonus miles for my travel. There would be no issues with language, immigration, food, water, weather, currency, or driving on the wrong side of the road. Prices for everything would be a tad high, but just about everything would be available. What wasn’t there to like, other than the possibility that the inviting stream we had waded into would soon gather speed and carry us over a lovely waterfall and into oblivion.
Sunset over Molokai, Maui
Gradually my paranoia waned. Flights to Europe weren’t getting any cheaper, and an attractive flight + car rental package to Maui presented itself. I did the math, and the car essentially came out to be free. We flipped through a few guidebooks and began to extend discrete queries to friends who know Maui well. The friends, who rarely mentioned their Hawaii trips before, now opened up with the measured enthusiasm of cultists well trained in the art of fly-fishing for future converts. They handled me expertly.
Maui was perhaps the most touristy of the Hawaiian Islands, but it sounded like a safe bet for keeping parents and kids equally happy. Trusted advisors sang the virtues of Hana and its verdant surrounds. My ear was similarly soothed with the siren song of sunsets on Napili Bay, on the island’s dry side.
Napili won out when my cousin told me about her visits to the down-to-earth Mauian Hotel, which stood “no higher than the top of a palm tree,” in accordance with a local ordinance. The rooms overlooked a grassy courtyard – reportedly hopping with frogs at night – that opened directly to the azure bay with its gentle summer surf and accessible snorkeling, all of which sounded very much acceptable to me, Fawn, and our kids.
Fawn and I looked at each other and I said, “What the hell.” I booked the flight and she called the hotel.
Napili Bay was developed in the late 1950s and early ’60s, before the building booms that yielded mega resorts such as Ka’anapali and Kapalua. The Napili Kai, the only resort, presides over the bay’s northern lip, and while it is impeccably groomed and pricey, it is modest in stature. Two-level hotels occupy the rest of the beachfront.
At a casual glance, the Mauian looks like a simple roadside motel, of mid-century vintage, with utilitarian architectural features and kitchenettes. Across the street from the Mauian, goats and chickens nibble and peck at the lawn in front of a single-family home. The Mauian is being spruced up, and recently began describing its rooms as “boutique beach studios,” but it will never be a resort. Comfort and a prevailing lack of pretense are a significant part of the hotel’s appeal. And its rooms go for one-third the price of the Napili Kai’s.
Our first two days progressed very slowly as we adjusted to the pace of life on a beach. We walked the length of the bay and at one end peered into tide pools formed in lava flows. We swam in the ocean, we swam in the pool. We beat our own path between the two, breaking only for lunch. My five year old son, Liam, had been struggling at the YMCA aquatic program’s eel level for several months, but now he was scooting through the water like a natural born frog.
Enjoying the shaved ice stand in Honokohau
We ate in. A friend recommended stopping first at the Costco in Kahului, just outside the airport. I resigned myself to the idea begrudgingly, and now we were enjoying home-cooked fish every day. (Costcos are almost the same everywhere, but the Maui one had a fish selection that included mahi mahi, ono, and wild opah fillets.) We sat in the hotel’s beach chairs and watched the sun go down, which it did very slowly, the sky’s colors intensifying until the wispy swirl of clouds over Molokai looked like a molten lava ice cream topping. The redness eventually spread over the entire sky, magnificently, and reflected off the ocean. We watched it dim gradually like a dying campfire.
We spent almost all of our time together, the five of us. We had no TV, no computer, no internet. No one complained or dragged their heels. My teenage daughter, Mai, read a book a day, including a few I had recommended. (Very flattering to me.) We played blackjack and rummy 500, and Liam invented a card game in which some of the cards were good guys and some were bad guys. While Fawn and I lost ourselves in sunsets the kids poked their fingers into holes in the sand, looking for the small crabs that came ashore every night. One gave Mai a hard pinch on her hand, but didn’t draw blood.
After a few days of beach limbo, we began to explore the island. One afternoon we drove up the rugged west coast to the little seaside hamlet of Honokohau. There were no hotels or restaurants or golf courses here. The tourist industry abruptly dies at Kapalua and the highway becomes two lanes, then one, and along a steep cliff edge I had to stop and back up when our car met another car going in the opposite direction. In the village we had shaved ice at a pink shack called Ululani’s. The we walked up the road to a lime green shack, called Julie’s, for banana bread still warm from the oven. I was never a big fan of banana bread, and now I knew why. I had never had Julie’s banana bread.
We drove up to the cone of Haleakala, the massive volcano that birthed East Maui. We reached the top in the early afternoon, just as the morning haze was lifting. The light wasn’t magical, as it is said to be during a cloudless sunrise, but the sight was spectacular nonetheless. Haleakala’s barren crater is invariably described as a moonscape, and that pretty much captures it. We took a short hike along a trail that follows the rim, and I snapped a few pictures of my kids standing around on the moon.
Haleakala Crater, Maui
We attempted a trip to Hana one day on the Hana Highway, but my daughter Lana’s carsickness compelled me to stop halfway, not far from the Ke’ananae Peninsula. A few cars were parked near a bridge, which often means there’s a swimming hole below. A man was getting out of his car with a baby and a dog, so I asked him if this was a good spot for a swim and he showed us the way down a slippery trail, where a waterfall dropped into a cool pool shaded by trees and surrounded by smooth rock. With our goggles on, we swam deep down into the dark pool and Liam pretended to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
We alternated days of driving with lazy days on the beach-pool circuit. We met our neighbors at the Mauian, including an elderly couple celebrating their 50th anniversary and a Filippino family that has spent a week a year at the hotel for the past decade. I got sunburned, but not to the point of madness. I wore a wetsuit top as a precaution.
We rented snorkle gear at Snorkle Bob’s and over the last several days became well acquainted with the bay’s population of green sea turtles, puffer fish, trumpet fish, and countless varieties of butterfly fish. I was obviously a foreign intruder in this environment, awkward as Steve Zissou in my flippers. Once I had learned to snorkel underwater without gagging I found myself entering a world that was entirely new to me, with cultural pockets, patterns of activity, and coral architecture that I didn’t wholly understand but found endlessly interesting and beautiful.
The fish did not seem to mind me as they went about their business. The turtles, each about large enough to fill a large washtub, are like underwater dirigibles, silently stirring up clouds of algae as they feed off the coral. You don’t always see them coming. They have a way of turning up at your side. I drifted far out into the bay, losing myself in densely populated corridors, until I bobbed up above the surface and found that the sandy beach was a mere sliver of bronze beyond the waves. It looked miles away.
In the end, the days had flown by and we were sad to leave. Will we do it again? Probably, though we have a dozen other spots we’d like to check out first. And next time we head for the islands, maybe we’ll check out one of the other ones. Some friends have been telling us about the Big Island and Kauai.
Planning a trip? Browse Viator’s Maui tours and things to do on Maui, from Maui luaus to Maui snorkeling and inter-island trips from Maui.
Written by Travel News on August 22nd, 2009 with
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