Maui Vacation 2011

Tonight we tossed and turned about what to do, go out, dine in, skip it all and go to bed.  We finally decided to cook a meal at home and then head to the movies later in the night.

Tonight’s Menu:

• Wagu Top Serloin Steak w/ Maui Steak Seasoning
• Butter Braised Green Beans (Finished with leftover steak drippings)
• Sweet Corn on the Cobb w/ Coarse Black Pepper
• Kraken Rum & Coke

Yeah, it goes without saying, it was Da Bomb.

Well we woke up this morning early so we could head out to “some amazing snorkeling” at La Perouse Bay which is at the very end of Makena road on an old lava flow (1790).  As we were getting ready we were greeted by a visitor…

After we were done being grossed out about that we got our gear together and hit the road.  It’s a nice drive, a bit sketchy in places but totally do-able.  When we arrived in the “parking area” We walked onto the lava flow towards a nice little bay area, ignoring the beach closed signs (we were told by a local it was fine) and entered the water.    While I can absolutely see the potential for this spot to be great snorkeling it had recently rained and thus the water was very cloudy and had limited visibility.  Too bad as I hear there are often dolphins and turtles in the morning times.  At any rate, we floated around for a little while, seeing what we could and then got out of the water.

The sand in this area (what little of it there is) is quite nice.  It’s a chunkier sand with all kinds of interesting bits in it.

There are a lot of birds in the trees around here, and there are also 5 lovebirds in a large cage out just past the porch.  They can be amazingly LOUD sometimes, and boy do they get up early.

Also, Marla the kitty cat lives here.  She is a funny little cat; she doesn’t meow so much as to be making noise or to announce something, it seems more of a statement that also contains annoyance that she’s having to tell you something in the first place.  As I was trying to get a picture of her, she jumped up on top of the birds’ cage and stretched and rolled around.  The birds were happy to have a completely different side of the cage to fly to.

We got up very early this morning, and drove to the end of the road.

I’d read that the snorkeling at La Perouse Bay, down on the southern tip of Maui, was great, and if you got there early enough in the morning you very well might run into some spinner dolphins and lots of sea turtles.  So we got up at 5am and headed out.

To get there you drive south past Kihei, Wailea, and Makena, eventually driving through the Cape Kina’u lava flow.  The lava flow is an amazing and very….other-worldly…place.  I’ve been there once before, years ago, and I got the same visual then as I did this time.  The lava looks to me like huge piles of the biggest Oreo cookies in the galaxy all crumbled up, as if giants or maybe the gods were making my grandma’s Oreo-cookie-crusted mud pie and got overzealous making the crust.

I’d only gone as far as the lava flow on my previous visit to Maui so wasn’t sure what to expect continuing further down the road that is obviously not meant for tourists.  I could imagine that this area is included in the Maui car rental agreements along with Hana as a place car renters promise not to take their rental cars.  But going slow, our friend’s borrowed car did just fine, and eventually we found ourselves at the end of the road in a very rough parking lot.  It was a little confusing trying to figure out where we should or could enter the water as its still lava flow at that location, but some words with a local and we chose our path and managed to find a safe entry point among all the somewhat stabby lava rocks all around.  Now, it had rained the previous night, but we’d thought it only rained up north, hoping that the dryer Kihei hadn’t gotten any the previous night.  We were wrong, and the water was extremely murky; almost no visibility.  We did take some pictures, but they are so sad I’m not going to bother posting them.  So we swam back in, traversed the stabby rocks, and headed back to town for breakfast.

So, failed turtle-dolphin-snorkeling mission, but totally worth the early morning swim, the crazy driving adventure, and lava flow experience.