Our second to last day in Maui was a lovely one in the am. Derek slept in, I had some coffee, Derek made us a breakfast that was scrumptious and full of things I don't normally condone the ingestion of, and we debated on doing something spectacular that turned into not a debate:
We booked a helicopter tour over the island.
We would take it at 7:30 in the morning the next day. Our last day in Maui was going to kick off with a helicopter tour, and Derek upgraded our seats to the primo seats right next to the helicopter pilot, and I was so fucking elated, Derek was so fucking elated, we just needed to figure out how to fill our time until then.
A friend of mine recommended going out and photographing a place called Dragon's Teeth. It wound up being a five minute drive from our villa, the day was gloriously sunny on our side of Mai, so we headed out for it. Finding it was a little confusing, because you have to walk along the edge of a golf course that has signs telling you to stay the fuck off the grass, you god damn pleb, keep your foot traffic to yourself. A couple pointed us in the right direction, though, so off we went.
This was literally the sunniest day we'd seen all week, so we were pretty fucking stoked to take advantage of it. And I got to wear my hat! A solid win in my book.
Wearing a hat meant having to continuously turn it backwards and wear it like a date rape fan to take photos, though, which was admittedly fucking annoying. Especially because it was unbelievably windy out. I was very worried I was going to lose my precious hat. So worried, in fact, that I did not notice when I lost my precious pink aviators that I have had and cherished and abused for years. Sorry about the incidental littering, Maui. :/ I didn't mean to.
Derek made his way down to Dragon's Teeth proper, and I hiked down this little crag down to the beach. As always, I wanted shots other people weren't looking to take. That is not to say that Dragon's Teeth is not cool as fuck, and that pictures of it were beneath me or something, quite the contrary. I DID go up there to take photos of it properly after exploring other avenues first, because it most definitely is worth photographing head on.
Pro tip: If you're ever traveling with me and I step away and disappear, just rummage about in the foliage for me in low-lying areas. I'm usually trying to get creative with the flora. I hope that helps.
I would say I ran around the area trying to find interesting things to photograph, but in reality, I kind of jump-stepped my way around, clutching at photographic straws. Since I am editing on the fly as I blog, I just looked through all of my wandering photos and I'm far from moved. I'll post some just to have them for posterity, but you wouldn't be missing much if I didn't.
DO YOU LIKE ROCKS? I HEARD YOU LIKE ROCKS. I HAVE SO MANY PICTURES OF SO MANY ROCKS.
Let's be honest with each other: I am not the photographer for landscapes. These are neat for posterity, but they're nothing photos. BUT WAIT THERE ARE MORE ROCKS.
And there are rocks...with wood!!!!!
So here are more rocks, but these rocks lead up to Dragon's Teeth. By this time, I was hot as fucking balls. I hadn't expected to be dancing my way through a menagerie of bad landscape photos for over an hour in the blazing heat, and I had lost my husband and somewhere among these photos are my gone forever pink sunglasses, rest in peace.
In case you had forgotten, there are these things called rocks, and they exist in the world.
So all of that is Dragon's Teeth. Jokes about superfluous rocks aside, this place was pretty fucking cool. It for sure looks like the jaw of a long dead dragon, it was not named poorly. I didn't edit the photos because I was most blown away by how fucking FOREIGN it looked there. I had gone from a golf course to a rock beach to an area that made me forget what planet I was on.
There was this really fun labyrinth, too. It was hard to take a good photo of the entire thing, but I tried.
I really wanted to get deep down in there and catch something interesting, but I was schvitzing like crazy, and I still hadn't found Derek and I was thirsty and I thought I was going to faint from being so needy.
Derek and I finally found each other, collectively bitched about being hot and thirsty and so ready to not do anything else for the car ride to wherever it was we were going next, and then we set out for where we were going next. After, of course, stopping to get me a new pair of sunglasses and us some liquids for our parched, parched bodies. That little strip of land in the distance is the island of Lanai, bee tee dubs.
Next stop was Ho'okipa beach, and I had been so excited about coming here. We get turtles out here all the time, but I had read that you could get like, eleventy threeve thousand at once on this beach.
YOU GUYS.
The beach did not fucking disappoint. There were so many fucking turtles!!!!!!!
You bow your god damn head to your new turtle overlords!
My favorite thing about these amazing critters was how hard they mean-mugged me and generally distrusted the cut of my jib.
That is the look of a turtle who doesn't trust me near its purse.
I don't know what the fuck I did to these turtles as a whole, but I mean, they haven't forgiven me and it doesn't look like they plan to any time soon.
How cute!!! It's sleeping too solidly to shoot me hate eyes!
This turtle just wants to be part of your world.
There was even a little baby turtle!!!!!!
When that wave crashed over it, a little girl freaked the fuck out and cried to her mom that the baby turtle was drowning. I laughed, but just to myself. It was cute that she cared and also cute that she didn't know how sea turtles work.
After Ho'okipa, we went back to Lahaina. We had been at turtle beach for a really long time, and we hadn't really done much that day. I think We ate at Paia Fish Market that night and ran into a retoucher with some serious fucking weight in his CV, and then we tried to get into Haiku Mill, buty I was depressed to discover that it was a wedding venue and not one that I could just wander into. For all of my research, I really biffed that.
All the way home I would take photos out of the window, hoping to catch some of the cool mountain landscapes with the warm sun making them lusciously golden. I took pictures of them, that's for sure, but don't expect anything magical and you won't be disappointed.
There's Molokini! I don't regret for a single moment not going. This picture is enough Molokini for me.
And a cute sailboat cruising between Maui and Lanai.
I know that pictures of the shit you see by the road probably isn't what most people consider worth photographing, but so much of the world looks like a strange planet if you take it out of its full context. Maui is no exception, and I really fucking love that.
This is it for our second to last day on Maui. Next blog covers the last day, and our helicopter tour, and I am so excited to FINALLY look through those photos.
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