MAUI

Okay, so Maui is the hip island. It’s the place to be. And it’s growing like South Florida. In fact, it often reminded me of the Sarasota area with its manicured golf courses and gated communities brimming with multi-million dollar ranch-style homes. But all is not as it seems.

Maui is shaped like a man looking downward with his head facing west and his body and feet in the east. The neck is where most of the action is located, like the island’s biggest town of Kahului, and the main airport.

We stayed at the bottom of the neck in trendy Wailea. This is where hotel rooms on the rocky ocean, with little or no beach, go for $1,600 a night, and Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan live next door to one another across from the world-famous Wailea Golf Gems complex. We didn’t do the ocean scene this time around but that is neither here nor there.

To understand Maui you need to head up to the summit of the slumbering Haleakalā Volcano. Haleakalā, or the East Maui Volcano, is a massive, active shield volcano — meaning it started under the ocean and erupted skyward over the course of millennia. Haleakalā comprises more than 75% of the Hawaiian Island of Maui. It dominates the landscape, weather, water, and life itself. Haleakalā means “House of the Sun” in Hawaiian.

Maui is named after a Polynesian demigod who was a trickster, like ol’ coyote in Navajo lore. And perhaps seducing rich folks to plunk down their money for a fancy home in paradise atop a smoldering volcano that popped its cork only 500 years ago might be one of his best tricks ever.

Haleakalā is on every touron’s to-do list. Most people scramble for the sunrise scrum. Parking is limited at the top, so it’s by reservation only and sells out every day. Or you can do sunset which is busy but does not require a reservation.

The problem is that the winding, switchback, 36-mile road up and across the south face of the volcano will take you at least an hour to drive and the middle part is through a 4,000-feet tall cloud bank with zero visibility, a million blind turns, and steady rain. And you will be doing it in the dark before sunrise or after sunset.

We were having none of that foolishness. So, we left our hotel at a very respectable one in the afternoon. We had been warned that it would be cold and ferociously windy at the summit, so we brought warm clothes and rain gear which proved to be totally pointless.

The drive began in what looked exactly like the high desert of the Southwest. It was mostly brown and there were cactus and mesquite bushes. But there were also many freshly irrigated fields growing a wide variety of specialty crops like oranges, coffee, and wind turbines.

At the 2000-feet elevation, the world turned a hilly green with grassy fields, fat cows, groves of towering eucalyptus trees, and eclectic, vaguely hippie-looking houses clinging to the lush hillsides just below the cloud belt. It reminded me of the Oregon coast.

At the 4,000-foot level, we climbed into the clouds and asked ourselves why we were driving to the top of Haleakalā if it was shrouded in rain clouds. What were we going to see? Then it started raining pretty hard.

At the 8,000-foot level, we came bursting out of the clouds and into bright sunlight. It looked just like the view from a jet plane soaring above the white puffy clouds. We actually stood at a pullout and the very top of the clouds were swirling around our feet.

The summit of Haleakalā is essentially Mars. The inside of the 7.5-mile by 2.5-mile crater is dotted with several red and black cinder cones and the only vegetation is a shiny plant called Silver Sword that looks exactly like its name. There’s a spooky white globe and aluminum foil-wrapped space station observatory at the tippy top and you can easily see the active volcanos of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea sixty miles away to the east on the Big Island of Hawaii. Our heads were spinning.

Haleakalā is run by the National Park Service and they charge $30 to see the show. For some inexplicable reason, they try and scare you at every turn, about the weather, driving, walking, sitting, and even breathing. Apparently we humans cease to function properly above 10,000 feet.

We pretty much had the place to ourselves at three in the afternoon and it was hot and calm at the top. We hiked a few cinder trails around the rim of the crater until around five when the sunset crews began rolling in and staking out their viewing positions.

It was time for us to leave, but not before we watched Maui’s weather being made.

On a typically warm day, trade winds carry moist air up the northeast slope of Haleakalā. As the moisture rises, it cools and condenses into the cloud layer that usually rings the volcano until the cooler air of evening sends the clouds packing. This process plays out almost every day and from a practical standpoint, it creates the tropical rainforest jungle with waterfalls and tumbling streams on the north side of the island, while the south side sits in a rain shadow. So, Hāna in the north gets a whopping 400 inches of rain a year, while Wailea, fifteen miles to the south gets only ten inches.

And, remember, all the development is taking place in Wailea. To make it work, the water managers have built an elaborate Rube Goldberg water diversion scheme to pump water from the north to the south.