Wednesday
Wednesday we tackled the "Road to Hana". Hana is a city on the North East side of the Island. The only ways to get to it are by boat or by the 50 mile long Road to Hana. So what!!! Well the road has about 600 hairpin turns and cutbacks, about 60 one-lane bridges, countless waterfalls and several other points of interest. The best way to travel the road is to get the accompanying cassette tape and listen to it as you go. The tape tells you what to look for at various mile markers and all kinds of things you'd be glad to know.
We stopped countless times to get out and hike and check out the action. The foliage is very different on this side of the island. It turns to tropical rain forest about an hour into the trip. Some parts look more like a jungle. We have several pix from this trip.
We came across several waterfalls and hidden pools. There is a great arboretum in this area that we wandered through as well.
The end point of the trip is the Seven Pools. This is a gorge that is high up. Sometimes the ocean rises to a level that fills the gorge. The rest of the time, the gorge is flowing with freshwater from rain runoff. The pools are staggered from top to bottom and each one pours into the one below. You can climb the rocks and swim in any of the pools.
We also visited a beach with black sand. The sand is actually lava that has been beaten by the ocean into a fine grit. It's not exactly like sand but pretty close. The waves on this beach were great.
The town of Hana is not really anything great...kinda like Derby, NY. but the road to it is the adventure. There is really nice shallow sandy beach there where we relaxed and swam for a while. We got our first tast of salt-water there. It really is salty!!!!
It took about 10 hours to make it to Hana. Naturally, the trip back would take that long as well...unless you take the shortcut. We rented the jeep just for this reason. The shortcut continues around the east side of the island around to the south side then straight up the middle to where we started. The fun part is that about 10 miles of the road is not paved and about 20 miles of what is paved is worse than that. We managed to keep all teeth from rattling out of our heads. I don't know how the jeep managed to stay together. By the time we made it back to the hotel, it was an even 12 hours...just like Karen told us it would be. Time for a couple mai tais!!!
