Northwest Maui

We celebrated our 15th anniversary in Maui, Hawaii last October.  We’d been to the big island of Hawaii and Kauai a little over 15 years earlier, and while we loved both, we wanted to try something new.  It’s surprising how different each island is, given how close they are.  We’d found local variations on each island, and Maui was no exception.  We chose to rent an apartment for the week, eventually settling on one between Kaanapali and Kapalua. Maui is a small enough island that you can explore it all from a central point, and while there were various areas that tempted us, the location on the Kanapaali coast gave us a good amount of options, with a supermarket in nearby Kapalua and all of the restaurants and shops of Kanapaali within a short drive. An added bonus was that there was a turtle cleaning station just out from our condo where we could watch turtles and snorkel with them. 

We flew from Denver to L.A., and then on to Maui, leaving at sunset with some pretty views of the California coast.  We landed in Maui around 9 p.m. Most of the airport is open air, and the hot, humid air hit us as we left the air-conditioned gate area; it smelled wonderful, but we’d already acclimated to cooler fall temperatures in Denver, so it was a little warmer than comfortable.  Fortunately, the airport seemed to be one of the warmest places we encountered there.  Soon we were driving up the west coast in our rental Jeep, with a cool ocean breeze blowing through the windows.  We arrived at our condo as the moon was setting over the ocean just outside our deck.  It was too dark to see much of a view, but what we could see was wonderful. The sound of the waves crashing into the shore just below our condo was a very soothing sound. We exhaled into our week in paradise.

First things first, we got up the next morning and headed down to the restaurant that we had been given the most glowing recommendations for: Leoda’s Pie Shop. We had an excellent breakfast followed by pie, naturally. The drive back up toward Kapalua in the daytime allowed us to appreciate what we hadn’t seen in our moonlight drive the night before. 

On our way back we got basic supplies at the local grocery, made a picnic lunch, and headed out on a hike along the Kapalua Coastal Trail.  We ate our lunch at a pretty spot along the trail, and then continued on north, into an optional loop of trail with views of a bird sanctuary.

At the north end of the trail, we stopped to watch surfers for a while before retracing our steps.  The path wound through an interesting combination of rocky coast, modest houses, and luxury hotel grounds.

After returning to the condo, we attempted snorkeling just off the beach below our deck, but the afternoon water was choppy, and the visibility was poor so we abandoned that quickly.  Instead we wandered around the grounds for a bit, enjoying the plumeria-perfumed air and the view over to the island of Lanai.

After a simple dinner nearby we watched the sunset and then turned in early—still adjusting to the time difference. Four hours was just enough for us to feel like old people, and we found ourselves crashing around 8pm every night.

After a snorkeling trip to Lanai (covered in an upcoming post), we spent the next afternoon and golden hour driving around the north side of the island, which is sparsely populated, wild, and windswept.  We saw a couple of small villages, but mostly just panoramic ocean views, volcanic cliffs covered in greenery, and increasingly narrow roads.  Thankfully, we didn’t see any other cars on that north section of the island, which was almost as amazing as the views. 

Finally, as the sun was setting, we descended into the more populous saddle between the two dormant volcanoes that form the bulk of the island, skirting Kahului and the airport, and rejoining the perpetually busy Honapiilani Highway.  That highway follows an S-curve from the west coast of the island, around the south side of Maui Komohana volcano, then across the low saddle to curve around Haleakala volcano along the north coast.  It’s the only road that services those popular coasts, and even in the best of times, it was very busy.  Traffic was the only thing that marred our time in Maui.

Despite an extra hour of traffic to get back to our condo, we reveled in the afternoon of gorgeous views and stunning scenes. Embracing island time, we chilled out and waited for traffic to get moving again, chatting about what we'd seen that day, and what we still had to look forward to. We had nowhere to be anyway. Having covered northwest Maui, we were ready to strike out and see other parts of the island. But first, we had a snorkel trip to Lanai the next morning.