Road to Hana

The road to Hana is the most famous drive in all of Hawaii.  They say that this trip is not so much about the destination as it is about the journey.  We left early one morning on our journey and we are so glad that we did this.  We rented a convertible and drove with the top down the entire day.  I drove and Charlie navigated since the trip ahead was filled with one lane bridges and over 600 turns.  You literally do not drive faster than 15 m.p.h for the entire trip.  And if you ever even consider going faster the roadside crosses every few miles marking where someone had died are a quick reminder to SLOW DOWN!

 

This part of the island is considered to be like the garden of Eden.  They can get as much as 360 inches of rain per year here where other parts of the island get only 16 inches a year.  That is why on this drive you are in the most lush rain forest you can imagine and then on  the way home you see the exact opposite.  It was amazingly beautiful.  The total trip took us 13 hours with lots of stops along the way.  It is beautiful waterfall after beautiful waterfall and you never have to go more than a few miles before it is time to stop again and see the most amazing sights.

 

 The road has signs like this all along the way.  I think this sign I found is far more descriptive of the road ahead.  There are switchbacks every few feet and many corners that you just hold on to the steering wheel and pray that no one else is coming the other way because the turns are so tight you can't even see where you are going until you are 1/2 way around it already.

As I said we rented a convertible and I would not have done this drive any other way.  We saw things with a completely unobstructed view.  Our lungs were filled with clean beautiful air all day and the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces felt oh so wonderful!

 

This was the first waterfall we stopped at.  We saw countless more.  We had a short muddy hike to get here and we were literally standing on the edge of a very high cliff and it made me nervous so we did not stick around too long.

This place below was breathtaking I could have stayed here all day.  There was a house just outside of where I took this picture.  I could not believe that someone lived right here.  You would expect it to be a giant home owned by someone rich and famous but no it was a small grubby house.  Do  the people that live there have any idea that they live in paradise? 

 Looking down at the ocean.  Just one of many of these kinds of views.

 

Here we are at the Three Bears falls.

 The picture below gives you a small idea of what this trip was like.  If you look closely you can see the small road and below is a waterfall that drops several hundred feet.  Many of these waterfalls you would not even know were there as you just drive by unaware of what lies below you.  We had to follow our guide book every mile to know when to stop. 

 

This was where we stopped to eat our afternoon snack.  The picture is not that great of us or at capturing the beauty of where we were but we have so few pictures of the two of us on the trip I threw it in.  This was by far the most beautiful place I have ever stopped for a picnic.

 

 Not that I think my feet are cute or anything but this was a fun way to see all the kinds of sand I stepped foot on in just one day.  We saw regular sand, red sand, black sand and a multicolored beach that was more rocks but so neat to see all the colors on one beach.



This is a shot of the black sand beach.  We loved it here.  The contrast between the green trees and the black sand was beautiful. We had been out for about 7 hours already by the time we made it here so we found a quiet little nook and laid out our towel and took a nap on the beach and it was fabulous!

Next stop was this red sand beach.  It was a scary hike in.  So scary in fact that we stopped 1/2 way and turned around to go back.  Luckily on the way back we found some other people that pointed out another trail that was not as bad.  We hiked back in and it was well worth it.  I don't have a great picture of the actual beach part but you can see how red the sand was from the picture I showed above. 

 

This place was cool.  The red of the sand and the blue of the water and the green of the trees and the black of the rocks was like nothing I have ever seen before I or will probably ever see again.  You can see in this picture that there was a line of rock that calmed the water just a bit to make it a great place to swim right by the beach.  The beach is just around the big black rock on the left of the picture.

 One of our last stops was at the seven sacred pools.  It was hard to capture this place on my camera but it was waterfall and then a pool and then a waterfall and a pool and then another waterfall and another pool....get the picture?  It was crazy beautiful.

 It was a little cool by the time we got here and technically you are not supposed to swim here but had it been a bit warmer I think we both may have hopped in.

 This was the bottom of the pools where the water flows out into the ocean.  Again the colors....there are no words to describe.

At  this point it was time to start heading home.  We still had about a 2 hour drive ahead of us and it was getting dark and we were getting to a part in the road that was even more dangerous than what we had already driven.  Remember those crosses I mentioned?  Yeah, there were even more of them along this section of the road.  It made us laugh when 11 hours into the drive we came across this sign.  Really narrow winding roads the next 7 miles?????  What the heck had we been on for the last 11 hours?  

 We did not plan it this way but we somehow managed to hit the side of the island right by the ocean right at sunset.  I have never seen a sun set so fast in my life.  We pulled over to snap some shots and before we could even get out of the car it was gone. This was the coolest sunset I have seen in my life.  The picture we got was a second or two late but this gives you some idea of what we saw. 

 One really fun moment before the sun went down was captured in this video below.  We had hit the side of the island where the road straightened out a bit and this is where the island goes from rain forest to death valley.  It was such a stark contrast after being enveloped in green canopy all day to all of a sudden be in a dry expanse.  Still beautiful but just very different.  The best moment was as we reached the peak as the sun was starting to set Beautiful Day by U2 came on and it was the prefect anthem to pump up the volume with the top down and just grin ear to ear.  I could not have said it any better, it was for sure a Beautiful Day!