trees, craters and mullets

We've had a great last couple of days exploring Maui, its such a chilled out, friendly place. The weather, perfect beaches and aloha spirit certainly make a great start to our trip. A couple of days ago we did a coastal drive from Kahalui to somewhere on the way to Hana, its a well touted tourist route because you can stop off at various places and trek through tropical forests, view water falls and paddle in crystal clear pools. Its a really great drive along narrow bendy roads with the cliffs falling into some of the brightest, most tourquoise water I've ever seen. Mike did a great job driving the FBI-wagon along the road, I know I would be wary driving along it in my car and it's about a third the size! We did this little trail to a pretty impressive water fall (everyone loves waterfalls) and whilst it was beautiful and the forest so lucious and colourful the thing I remember the most is the smell. There were guava trees everywhere, and they were so ripe with fruit that would squish underfoot, they made the air so deliciously sweet you could almost live off it.

Yesterday we headed to Haleakala national park. Its a massive altitude crater, absolute moonscape. It's always thrilling to be above the clouds, and whilst the air is noticably thinner its so crisp and eerie fresh its really exhilerating. There are various trails, we chose one that was a bit ambitious but only about 700m change in altitude. We;ve both trekked at altitude before so we thought it would be about 3 hours in total. We got a pretty heavy health and safety debrief from a ranger, but the thin air was obvioulsy getting to me because I found everything totally giggle inducing. His advice made me change from shorts to trousers and I'm really glad. It took about 5 hours, was unbelievably hard work and totally knackering! Great scenery, volcanic geology is fasinating, all reds and black, void of greenery but stunning in its baroness. There are these cool native plants that ancient Hawaiians called greygrey as they are silvery but they has no such word as they had never seen silver before.They really stand out against the all the red.

Last night we went to an 'old school disco', there isn't much in the way of night life in this part of Maui, so we had been looking forward to it all week. It was local, cheesy fun. We had a great night dancing to Madonna and Lionel Richie with the friendly locals, even if we did feel a bit young and in need of a mullet. The cheesyness didn't really matter, it was just good to party and meet people. After Mike went to bed I hung out with Cory and his family and collegues, a great bunch of people that were born islanders who worked in the local mall, kept their emotions near the surface and were fun and welcoming. I definitly want to hang out with some more islanders before we go!