The Road To Hana....

There is a famous road on Maui called "The Road To Hana" and it is a long winding coastal road of about 50 miles along the north eastern coast of Maui.

The road is famous because of the fabulous coastal scenery, the huge variety of waterfalls and seascapes - and is known as a view of the "real" Hawaii, untouched by the new hotels and restaurants on the west coast.

Although Hana is only about 59 miles from our hotel, we read that a typical trip to Hana takes about three hours, as the road is very winding and narrow and passes over 59 bridges, 46 of which are only one-lane bridges.

There are approximately 600 hairpin curves along the Road to Hana, and virtually all of the journey travels though lush tropical rain forests, and hogs the coast line high up the cliffs and then down on the coastline.

It was a great day and rather than 3 hours - it took us over 6 hours to reach Hana with many stops along the way.

Here are some of our pictures from the day.

The journey starts in Paia which is a small town - home to more surf shops per capita than any other place I have seen!

One of the best surfing beaches in the world is about 3 miles out of Paia.

Fiona outside a shop making her new favourite drink.

The "Road To Hana" starts with a typical Hawaiian beach - but this one happens to be one of the best surfing beaches on Maui.

Some surfers practicing on the waves - but the winter months are when the best and biggest waves crash onto this beach.

You can see the road winding along the side of this hillside in the distance.

The next pictures show the Rainbow Eucalyptus trees which have bark that is multi coloured.

They grow in this rain forest climate very quickly and will grow about 5 to 8 feet per year and as you can see from this picture they grow very tall.

We stopped at many beautiful bays with crashing waves.

One of the most popular foods made by the local Hawaiians on this side of the island is Banana Bread.

We saw many stalls and farms selling this and other fruits and refreshments.

At this stop we saw that they sold Shaved Ice as well as Banana Bread and so we stopped and ordered - and what we got was a massive serving of Shaved Ice which was delicious.

You can see just how big these were here.

As you can see from these pictures some of this shoreline has spectacular scenery with massive waves.

The Road To Hana is very green and lush and quite different from the other side of the mountain (volcano) which is very dry and hot.

These pictures show one of the many beaches along the Road To Hana and this one has a "black beach" and further down the page you can see that this beach was made from millions of small black stones.

These are only a few of the areas that we stopped at along our journey.

By the time we arrived in Hana it was 6:30 p.m. and the sun goes down in Hawaii at 7 p.m. every night - and it had taken us over 6 hours to get here.

There were apparently over 600 hairpin bends on the way to get here (and it felt like it) and dozens of single track bridges, but it was a great day.