If I Lived Here I Would Have a Papaya Tree and Eat Local

Lahaina, Maui

March 6, 015

The first thing I saw when I looked out towards Maui was a beautiful rainbow.

Listen to Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

It rains a lot in the mountains and then the wind blows little droplets of water out towards the shore so that when you are near the shore and you look up towards the mountains and the sun is just so, you will see a rainbow. In fact, you can often feel the drops of water when you are several miles from the place where it is raining. Because it is so windy. Like today.

We anchored in Lahaina Harbor today around 7 am. We wanted to wait a bit until the crowds died down before we tried to get on a tender. The truth is that the crowds never die down, but that doesn't stop us from believing it could happen. We went down to get our tender tickets at 8:40. After a short time we were called to board a tender. Our ride to shore was very choppy - about the roughest we have ever experienced aboard a ship's tender. Usually they will not try to use the tenders when it is too rough because it is so hard to load and unload the tenders - but after missing Kaua'i, I guess they didn't want to miss another port. I wouldn't say they threw caution to the winds, so to speak, but maybe they pushed their conservative envelope a bit. I think we had Force 6 winds today, in case you were wondering. 

All this wind and chop made the ride to Lahaina slow. When we got there we had to wait about 15 minutes for the rental car van. Then we had a 15 minute drive to the rental car office in Kaanapali. Elapsed time from leaving our cabin to getting behind the wheel in the car: 1 hour +. Is this worth it?

Did I mention that it was windy? It was also about 71 degrees and threatening to rain, so our best laid plans to go to the beach today had to be abandoned. We decided to drive around Kaanapali instead. Kaanapali is a large PUD-type development consisting of golf courses, timeshares, hotels, and condos. It is very pleasant to drive around there, but it does have a vibe of entitlement and gated community and haole. 

We parked near a beach access point and got out to look around. By lucky coincidence, it had just started raining, so we got to see what Kaanapali looks like in the rain. There was some kind of a flea market going on nearby, so we walked over to see if there was any good stuff. They had the same type of stuff you see in all tourist-driven flea markets, but more expensive. Some of the stuff was maybe a little more artsy and a little less souvenirish than we had seen elsewhere, but still . . .

In addition to hand-blown glass, and hand-thrown pottery, and ugly things made out of cut up license plates, there were handmade soaps and lotions. I heard one of the lotion vendors talking to some ladies: "Are you by any chance from Alberta? Wow, what a coincidence. Did you know that we sell more of our lotion to people from Alberta than anywhere else?" Marketing genius at work, I guess. Or eavesdropping.

We didn't stay long - it was cold, windy and wet. We decided to continue driving to Kapalua and then turn around and take the coastal route back. Not a whole lot to see there.

Next we went to the Hilo Hattie's Outlet. Woo hoo! (Not really.) It turned out to be a bust, so we had dessert - HH's "famous" pineapple whip. Pineapple flavored soft-serve ice cream. Not bad.

That made us hungry for lunch, so we started to drive to a fish place we had seen earlier, but when we passed a beachfront place called Aloha Mixed Plate, we knew that was where we had secretly wanted to go all along.

(In Hawaii, a "plate lunch" is a popular menu item. It consists of some sort of meat or fish, often Teriyaki-style, plus a couple of scoops of sticky white rice and a scoop of macaroni salad. A mixed plate is a plate lunch with three kinds of protein - in this case beef, chicken, and fish.) 

It was windy and cool, all the seating was outdoors, but the view of the water was so nice, I put on my pullover and acted Alaskan, and toughed it out.

We orderd a Mochiko chicken plate lunch and a Loco Moco. (A Loco Moco is a hamburger with grated carrot and other stuff mixed in, with an over-easy egg on top of it. The burger sits on a pile of sticky rice, and brown gravy is poured over all of it. And a side of macaroni salad. When in Lahaina, eat local.) Ken had a local beer that was made with a lot of wheat and a bit of passionfruit.

A little liquid Aloha - note map of Hawaii on the top right

We enjoyed our lunch so much we decided to split a piece of pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. I would have to say that this was the best pineapple upside-down cake I have ever had.

After lunch we thought we should at least put our feet in the ocean. The temperature had gone up a little and we imagined there might be less chance of rain if we drove in the other direction, so we headed towards Kihei. We passed several beaches, but they were either too small or had no more parking spaces, so we turned around at Olawolu and headed back towards Kaanapali. We used a different entrance and found a tiny parking lot by a beach access point and took a two-minute walk to the beach.

It was a very beautiful beach: scenic, clean, wide, and uncrowded. 

Tip 
How to find an uncrowded beach:

Look for a beach that is very windy and has cold water.

We did achieve our goal of getting our feet wet, and then we quickly retreated before our legs got blasted away by the blowing sand.

We returned the car just in time to catch the next van back to the dock in Lahaina. During this trip we learned that the 5:15 ferry to Lanai had been cancelled due to the rough seas. We wondered how the Princess tenders were doing.

By the way, if you are going to Maui, try to avoid using Dollar Rent-a-Car. I will eventually be providing a full explanation on TripAdvisor, so I will not go into it now.

There was a huge line for the tenders so we elected to walk around in Lahaina for a while. This was not logical. We were well aware that the line only gets longer and longer as it gets closer to the time for the last tender. But you never know. I went into a quilt shop to see if I could find a nice pattern for a Hawaiian-style quilt. There were some nice ones, but all of a sudden a little voice reminded me that I already have more quilt patterns than I can ever sew in my lifetime, so I left that shop empty-handed. 

When we got back to the tender line, we waited 35 minutes to board a tender. Elapsed time from the time we got in line until we reached our cabin home-away-from-home: 1 hour+. Was this worth it?

Upon returning to the ship we learned two things:

1) At around 11:30 or 12:00 this morning, tender service from the ship to the shore had been suspended. A number of people who were in no particular hurry to get off the ship were ultimately unable to get off. (A few days later we spoke to one of the ship's officers. He told us there had been some concern on the bridge over the possibility of hundreds of passengers being stranded on Maui.)

2) Shabbat services were not listed in the schedule, but we were supposed to know that they would take place at 5:15.

There was a crew member from India at Shabbat services. He told us he was Jewish. Everybody else there was older than we are. They were so surprised to learn there were Jews in India. They were just as surprised to learn there were Jews in Alaska.

Guess what . . . The ship was over an hour late leaving Lahaina because of the slowdown with getting people back to the ship. Guess what else . . . we skipped dinner tonight.

After not eating dinner we went to hear Paul Tanner, a vocal impressionist. We didn't like him and we didn't stay very long. Enough with Tom Jones already.

Shabbat Shalom!