Anyway.
The trip was fucking amazing. First of all, the place we were staying was way more than we normally require. Because we are busy busy busy busy busy when we vacation, we tend to choose the least expensive place with the most affordable bed, because we get up at the ass crack of dawn and stay out until late late late, photographing things and eating local food and experiencing everything we can until we're too dog ass fucking tired to keep going. I really researched our trip, though, and the most availability with the most affordability was a trip through Costco Travel at a villa on the beach in Lahaina. So not our style, but I wasn't fucking mad at it.
We ended up hanging out in the villa a lot more than we usually do when we travel, so the huge place was nice. We cooked dinners and breakfasts for ourselves, there was a day where Derek slept way way in and I woke up and had a lovely spot of coffee to myself on the balcony and watched the sunrise. We did our usual and got some local rum (a tradition since Jamaica) and it will blend in well with out other Hawaiian rums. It tastes like straight brown sugar pecans. Very rich, super yummy.
The first day was kind of a blur, if I'm being honest. As is our wont, Derek and I packed for Maui literally six hours before we had to leave. We ran into a hang up over the cats, as the person who was meant to watch them and watch the house got into a car accident and mangled his hand so badly his wrist made an S shape (I wish that were hyperbole), and his face turned into ground meat. Not a good look, and kinda hard to watch someone's place and their critters when you're in the hospital waiting to have surgery. Also we are notorious procrastinators. We packed until about midnight, and then had to wake up at 2:45 to get to the airport by 3:30 so we could make our boarding time. Of course I took the obligatory touristy photos before we took off:
I never travel without that necklace. Such a silly thing, as I don't even believe in patron saints, but things have as much power as you give them, and I haven't traveled anywhere without that on my person since I got it.
Feel free to ogle my amazing Maui themed nails.
The flight was damn near empty, so we got bumped up to first class, and that would have been an amazing experience except it was 5:45 in the morning, I was exhausted, and the flight was literally 15 minutes long.
When we arrived in Maui, I was just blown away by flying over it at sunrise. Honestly, I took about two dozen photos on my cell phone as we flew in.
Those are really the only ones worth viewing. I just cruised all of the photos on my phone that I took for posterity, and I was exhausted so I can be excused for the photos being trash.
Since we got to the airport so fucking early, it was crazy ass empty. Like, eerily empty. I sent a photo to Allen and I told him that I'd never been more freaked out at an airport.
It was like being in an apocalypse movie where we starred as two characters that had been flying while the world ended, and when we landed, we were it. I will say that, with as much as I truly loved Maui, I kind of wish that had been the case. One of the nice things about Oahu is I can avoid Honolulu and Waikiki and stay on my side of the island. Even North Shore, outside of the fucking grotesque (but not without its charm) Haleiwa, doesn't feel as touristy as Maui felt. Most of the island is inaccessible unless you're traveling by helicopter, so there is only so much space that people can occupy. Maui felt packed and congested and awful and despite the hypocrisy of being someone who was visiting their, I really found myself feeling fucking highly resentful of the tourists. They were just so fucking rude and inconsiderate. Later I'm going to talk about the road to Hana, and I just...I was fucking stressed and irritated by 80% of the other visitors because they showed no respect for the place they were in or the people they were sharing it with. Nothing helps me understand why people fucking hate Americans as much as traveling with other Americans.
Anyway.
The day we arrived was so cool and gorgeous. There were clouds, but there are always clouds on the islands. There was a beautiful breeze, the air was crisp, it was like tropical fall. We picked up our rental car (we drove this fucking AMAZING hybrid that made me want to trade in Jasper for a more eco friendly mode) and headed for the hotel, which was an hour away from the airport. We were still fairly high from arriving, and Derek had napped on the flight, so we weren't too exhausted, but we WERE starving. I thought Maui was going to be more like Oahu, but it wasn't. Long stretches of just road with no gas stations or convenience stores or restaurants. Honestly, I prefer that, because the land shouldn't be destroyed to make way for stupid consumer shit like that, I just wasn't expecting it. So we drove the hour to our villa without stopping for food due to nowhere to stop, and we were told that we were about six hours too early to check in. So we drove around the community (it was a golfing community. I HATE golfing communities on the islands. In general, really, but especially on the islands) and found the little hub of store/deli/liquor store/tourist tincture lobby and stopped in for a bite. Being vegan and keto makes finding food almost impossible if I'm not cooking it, so I won't even lie: I cheated the entire time we were there. Something had to give, and it was either veganism or keto. I can't afford the carbs, so I cheated on my moral compass and I ate meat and animal products and I hated myself for it but it DID make it possible for me to eat.
We needed a way to kill time, so we went to the Maui aquarium. I only got a couple of photos worth keeping there, but honestly, I feel like every aquarium photo I've taken is the same. So I'm not even going to bother posting them. It was a cool aquarium, though. They had sea turtle babies that they care for until they release them into the wild, they had sea turtles they were rehabbing from their horrible drug and alcohol problems until they were ready for re-release, they even had a couple of baby sharks that had been as big a surprise to them as they were to me seeing them. I think they were lemon sharks, or maybe black tip reef sharks. They were gorgeous, though. I know a lot of vegans have problems with zoos and aquariums, and I get the urge, but the Maui aquarium was doing really good conservation work, and a lot of really important rehab work for animals that may have otherwise died or lived miserable lives, so I am very pro aquarium and very pro zoo, given that both institutes are accredited. I don't like the kind that are gross and exploitative and abuse their animals and put them in shit living conditions, but this is all not the point.
We had a very tasty, but quite overpriced, lunch at the aquarium, and we still had hours to kill before we could check in. I don't even remember what we did, I just remember checking in to our villa and slamming some energy drinks and then beelining to Road to Hana. It was a beautiful day, and I had been waiting so patiently to see everything there that I didn't want to wait for the next day.
I had had an itinerary set up for our entire trip. I am a thorough researcher when Derek and I travel, and I don't want to waste a second of the trip because leaving a place and knowing I won't return (there are other islands to see, after all, and why return to a place twice when you can go once and then go somewhere new?) fills me with regret if I think I missed out on seeing something.
That was my initial schedule for our trip. I am here to tell you that we did almost 0% of that the way that I had planned.
We arrived as planned, we picked up the car as planned, and then the rest of the trip was just a whole bunch of disrespect of my designed itinerary, and it was me that suggested we throw the plan away.
The first day, we arrived, got the car, did the aquarium, and did the road to Hana just a little bit. Enough to really whet my appetite for the entire thing.
Let's move on to the second day, though.
The second day did go fairly well to plan. My claim of 0% was facetious. We woke up balls fucking early. I think we went to bed at like, 9 and woke up at 2:30am to get our gear ready and pack up the car and head to Haleakala. We were exhausted, but seriously jazzed to go up there. You have to make reservations to see sunrise (as you may have noticed from the top of my gone-to-shit itinerary), and they only allow 100 cars in every morning from 3am to 7am. You can make the reservations 60 days in advance. I did. To the minute. And they were almost all gone when I booked ours. I also booked us two days just in case the first day was shit and we didn't get any photos, because knowing you could have done better with a photo that you will never get a chance to redo is the fucking WORST feeling. So we got up early, and headed out early, and let me fucking tell you, friends. the drive up Haleakala in the dead of night is fucking TERRIFYING. It's thrilling and scary and amazing. I loved it and Derek had such a boner for driving it in his WRX and I was such an odd combination of shit-my-pants scared of the drops and titillated as fuck by the drops. It was intoxicating.
I lived in Colorado for almost a decade. I went to the top of Pike's Peak, I did the mountains at RMNP, I loved being in a high altitude state. I forgot what a drag going from sea level to something far fucking higher than sea level is. I bitch about my figure, but the truth is I am in quite good shape, athletically, and being winded from climbing a set of stairs at 10500 feet is just not a good feeling. I didn't get altitude sick, but I did feel light headed, and it took me about an hour to get used to it. Here's the other thing you forget when you live at sea level in the tropics: it gets fucking COLD at high altitudes, especially when there is zero fucking sun.
Now, I'm not an idiot. I was aware that it was going to be cold. We brought proper gear, I wore two long sleeved shirts and a hoodie with a pair of leggings AND a pair of warmer pants. Derek did the same, plus a beanie. Our problem was gloves. When you live in a tropical environment, gloves aren't a thing they just have hanging out in stores hoping that someone quirky will come buy them. We scoured Oahu for warm weather gloves, couldn't find shit, and it was my hope that Maui would sell them knowing people go up to Haleakala for a frigid sunrise experience, but no dice. The best thing we found were flimsy work gloves, and spoiler: they did not fucking do the trick. We got up there way earlier than the 4am I dictated because I wanted to try for some milky way shots. We got there at 3:30, which meant having to wait 2 hours for the sun to rise and then another...oh, 45 minutes for it to be full present and worthy of photographing. After maybe an hour of photographing the milky way, which....I cannot even begin to describe how amazing that felt. The milky way was so fucking prominent, and it was so fucking QUIET, and there were so many stars, and it was just me and Derek sitting under this tremendously open sky, filling the silence every once and awhile with the click of our shutters. It was the closest thing to experiencing the fullness of reality that I may ever come. I felt so alive and human and exposed and real sitting on top of Haleakala. Derek and I sat in different places, and in the brilliant dark it is easy to forget that other people exist. I was moved beyond belief to be where I was, in the time that I was, and nothing could have prepared me for that feeling. It isn't even like I've never been up on a mountain to photograph the milky way before. I have. It's amazing every time. I guess I just forget how it impacts me, and that, I suppose, is just a sign of how very fucking human I am.
I don't know how to stack images, and astral photography isn't something I do enough to really concern myself with getting good at it. I apologize for the shit quality of that image, but mother fuckers...we fucking live in that. How god damn amazing is it that I can photograph it poorly??
People started filling in at about 4:45, and I was so god damn cold. The gloves were doing fuck all, the wind was gentle but its effect was god damn brutal, and being honest, I felt truly uninspired by the place we had set up at. I knew we were in the wrong spot for the photograph I wanted to take. We were in a beautiful spot for viewing and experiencing, but for photographs? No. There are two places you can park at to watch the sunrise as laid out by the park. There's the lower viewing area, and the summit, and we chose the summit because that just makes sense when you are mapping out logistics. We chose poorly. We should have gone to the lower area and done the small hike so we could get a view of the crater as the sun rose. I saw that the second there was even a peek of light coming up over the cloud line. So I'll be honest, I didn't bother myself with staying in the spot I had chosen. I gave it up and focused on photographing the people focusing on the sunrise. I had a blast doing that.
This was pretty fucking early, maybe 4:15. There's a viewing pagoda you can sit in to shield yourself from the wind and the cold, and the people using their phones in there gave it this really cool glow. It was about this time that I knew I was in the wrong place for the photo I believed I could take that morning. I have a bunch of stacked images that I haven't processed properly yet, because I don't know how to do them in photoshop and doing them in lightroom yielded less than good results, and I will get those done eventually. I want to post them for posterity, just because I was there for this and it's important to recognize things I experience.
Maybe 5am, and this is maybe a fifth of the total people we had at our viewing area. I really loved watching everybody watch the sunrise, though. It was like stealing from the experiences of others. My excitement for the thing itself was still there, but my excitement to photograph it had completely diminished. I felt more excited about photographing people who WERE excited to photograph it. What a delight.
My excitement dwindling to photograph the sunrise had absolutely nothing to do with the beauty of where I was as a whole. I cannot stress enough that the summit of Haleakala is god damn stunning. Those clouds are AMAZING. The colors are amazing. I'm not bothering to edit the photos, those are just straight out of camera, and just...it's a tremendous privilege to view something this pretty.
This photo is meant to be part of a stacked image, but honestly, I am not feeling it. I don't know that I'll be satisfied with any of my images that weren't of people viewing the sunrise. I wasn't really invested in getting my settings right, because I wasn't feeling where we were for framing. I do want to put this in here though because I thought where I was was just breathtaking. The settings of that photo are all wrong because it's the third shot in a series of six and it isn't meant to stand alone, but check out that view. I was above the clouds, and it was amazing.
That is not to say that I didn't talk myself into trying to grab one. I was only partially successful in my attempt.
I wasn't stupid enough to NOT try and get a cresting sun shot, but it's fairly obvious that I wasn't trying that hard. This is a posterity shot, and it's barely that.
This is the observatory, and there was one time at about 3:45 where I heard the roof rotate and it scared the fucking piss out of me. My deaf ass husband didn't hear it and he thought I was imagining things, but I wasn't.
Everybody clearing out of the ridgeline because the sun had crested and I guess that was all they needed. The reality is probably closer to they were fucking freezing and they wanted in their vehicle where heat existed. I didn't mention this, but I had to take a heated car break for at least twenty five minutes. I was so fucking cold, and I am nowhere near the trooper that Derek is. In fact, you heard ity here first, I am a fucking pussy that lives to complain. Shocking, I'm sure, but I was a walking pair of titsicles and I needed relief. However, being that I am an idiot about electric cars, I did not know how to turn it on and my attempt to get warm was only partially successful. I am an asshole.
Did I do that?
No. No I did not. I was cold and cranky because all of the touristy tourists were there being hogs and pains in my ass. I was patiently waiting my turn at the lookout and I got railroaded by some asshole and his wife who just shoved me right out of the way so they could barrel their way into the space I had been waiting my turn for. I was so fucking angry. That was after I fucked up the following two shots, though.
This is under-exposed and poorly composed. What I SHOULD have done, and I knew it, was take a few photos with different settings to make sure I got the drama of the landscape. What I ACTUALLY did was not that.
This is a shot I thought I had done well, and I thought I'd be satisfied with it when I got home. I'm not, but this is just me being a bad photographer rather than a lazy one.
If I didn't think I was a better photographer than the aesthetic of these allow, I wouldn't be upset at these two photos. As posterity shots go, they are fine. As shots I want to take to toot my own horn with, they are so far from the bar that I've set for myself. I could have done better. I wish I had paid more attention to my own itinerary, because we didn't end up going back to Haleakala for a second sunrise.
Here are the shots I tried to take as we blazed down the mountainside:
Haleakala was an experience for fucking sure. I loved it, despite feeling uninspired. We did have a second morning slated, but we ended up dropping that, and I'll explain why in a different blog. I don't need to break these up, but I feel like I should.
So.
In the next blog, it's going to be all Road to Hana, and some tidbits from the days that followed.
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