Roads to&from Hana

In the old days before European contact there were 30-40 thousand people living around Hana. Hana has a good harbor, quite a bit of flatland to grow poi &  humans flourished there.

Nowadays Hana has a reputation for being a combination of hippy's and wealthy folk, as a very poshy hotel set up there. It has a wonderful out-posty general store,  and getting there affords you many opportunities to buy homemade banana bread & coconuts. Houses tend to be built less to code, putting it mildly, but some are build in the traditional oh-so-Hawaian simple style complete with corrugated roof and much green paint.

George & I drove to Hana yesterday. I drove the dry side first and he the wet side.

The dry side started with Grandma's Cafe. I love these rural mailbox collections. There was one outside of Grandma's This is the classic green paint. This area was settled by Chinese.

 

So next door to it was Fong's the dry goods store. We learned that there was a Dr. Sun Yat Sen garden down the way so we stopped there. We were greeted there by poinsettias to die for.

I LOVE this schemata on the base of Sun's statue. There was a lot more too along this vein. Here's another. Some of it is quite revealing.

Classic!! I want to google this whole scheme to pass it on to some of my political friends. Sun went to two schools in Hawai'i & had a brother who lived here.

Onward into the part of Maui I think of as being the moors. Our first great view was of the most recent lava flow on Maui-- maybe in the 1600's, but maybe longer ago than that. I'm not sure.

Not many people live out this way. So services, but plenty of peace. The air was completely machine-free. I love the building in the collapsed cinder cone.

The erosion is wonderful to see. This is the lower slopes of Haleakala, the eastern Maui volcano.

George got pretty windblown!







I loved the ribbon road effects.

 Not to mention cloud-shadows on water.  Oh yum!!

This fetching #14 cow was one of many in this stretch of land. Grass-fed Maui beef is good.

Further along we stopped at an old graveyard. There are several kinds of graves here. We've visited twice. It's a very peaceful place, right at the cliff-edge of the ocean. Charles Lindberg is buried here. George says a perfect place for burial, if you like that sort of thing.

This is a concrete slab with lettering etched in and lava rocks too. The simplicity of it is really nice. People leave loose rocks at the graves too, so there is a feeling of attendance & care here.

Some of the graves were simply covered with rounded rocks.

After lunch we started home on the northwest side.  The road was high & below in a truly Hawaian community poi is being grown in these ponds. I so want to go down there & look, but I so don't want to gawk at other people's lives! In this arial shot TWO churches stand-- I want to know what the story is there. I'd love to see that graveyard too. There were several communities like this to wonder about.

The 'tulip'trees were in bloom.  Lots of orange amongst the green.

We wanted to walk in a bamboo forest. We looked for one, but didn't find one with a trail. There are several kinds of bamboo brought here. This is what I call the spindly bamboo. Some of the stands we saw of bamboo were impassably thick. This shot was done with Sabina's method of 'drive-by-shooting': blurry.

It was a great day for vegetation, microclimates, geology, & beauty.

                                                                That's all for now.