Headed to another volcano today along with some new friends. Two Swedes have accepted our offer of a ride to the top and we headed out. Daniel Akesson and Andreas Johansson are in their early twenties and are headed around the world. They work at home until they earn enough to keep travelling.
Maui is a beautiful island with a mixture of development, some jungle and the arid higher grasslands. The topography on some parts of the island reminds me of the Okanagan Valley with brown grassy hills.
The summit of the Haleakala volcano is at 10,000 ft and we drove all the way to the top. There are a lot of switchbacks to get to 10,000 ft and the road builders decided to put them in as small an area as possible. Unlike BC however they did put in a fair number of guardrails.
The view from the top is tremendous and you are literally on top of the clouds. Lana and I, along with our Swedish friends decided to hike a mile or so into the crater. The weather was perfect (for the summit anyway) at about 53F (11.5C) and sunny. We hiked in with little difficulty but since the in path was a downhill one that was to be expected. The way up and out of the crater took considerably longer.
The next summit over was the US. Air Force's space tracking installation and wasn't open to the public. Still they say they are tracking over 8,000 pieces of stuff in orbit from that spot so they must be busy.
Next we went cruising the uplands of Maui. We travelled on some great narrow roads which I found challenging and Lana found scary. Sorry I meant that Lana found my driving scary.. I am pretty sure the Swedish guys in the back were enjoying the inateraction between the navigator and the driver since they kept laughing and talking in Swedish.
Eventually we got hungry and stopped at a little hole in the wall cafe which had really excellent food. Turns out they have their own web site (grandmascoffee.com). I had the taro burger which was good but needed cheese. All of us highly recommend this place. It doesn't hurt that the wait staff are not only grandma's great granddaughters but are also cute and friendly. They certainly seemed to impress our Swedish friends.
Continuing on the narrow country roads we ran across a winery. The only one in Maui. Believe it or not they had some good reds made from grapes and some really interesting whites made from pineapples. Really they were quite good if really different. Everyone's personal favourite was the raspberry wine which was absolutely fantastic.
The history of the ranch where the winery was based was really interesting and worth a visit by itself. Ulupalakua Ranch had been around since 1858 and they are currently involved in some really interesting environmental restoration work on some of their lands.
We had a great day and, in return for taking them around, our Swedish friends insisted that I help them kill a case of Budweiser. I didn't want to do it but for the sake of international relations we gave it a shot. At some point in the night we had them send a bizarre message to our son via Facebook. Sorry about that David.
This a picture of me with the crater in the background. Right before this Lana had asked for the car keys. Seems I was a little close to the edge.
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