I had been shielding my eyes from the sun while were were hiking the last couple of days, a hat would solve that problem, plus I wanted the usual kitsch to announce that I had traveled to another island. I kept kicking myself over buying tourist shit as a person who actually lives in the archipelago, but I didn't let my own shit talk stop me! Check it:
I am aware that I am deeply uncool, but also I love my hat.
We set out relatively early this day because we wanted to get to Wai'anapanapa Beach while it was still empty. We grabbed our food and got into the car to make the long ass drive to the beach park, which is pretty much the last stop on the road to Hana. There are other things to see past Hana, and we wanted to do those, as well, so having a stacked itinerary meant eating the car.
Derek, seen here in his natural state.
I had read a travel blog that I would link if I could remember where this girl said she always headed out to Wai'anapanapa before sunrise because she liked having the beach to herself for optimal photos. I wasn't willing to do a Haleakala type morning again, but if I knew for sure then what I know for sure now, I would have. Wai'anapanapa is an incredible looking beach. I cannot even begin to imagine the kinds of photos I could have taken on it with an hour or two to myself and Derek before the crowds really arrived. I snapped my first shot at 10:00 on the nose, and there weren't many people there, but it was still too many. Had we been there at 6? Incredible. It would have been incredible. As it stands, the beach park is absolutely fucking AMAZING. Derek and I hung out in this cave and watched huge waves crash in, and it kept us dry from the downpours that came every few minutes, lasted only a few minutes, and then went away. There was so much more to explore there, but the downpours were quite fierce, and they were enough of a deterrent that we opted to keep heading toward O'heo Gulch to see the Seven pools. I really really wish the weather had been better. The photos I have won't look as good as a sunny day, and I'm worried the fucking awe inspiring beauty of a black sand beach just won't shine through like it would if the sun had been out and the sky had been blue. Well. You have to work with what you have.
So before I headed down to the beach, I took a few shots at the overlook.
I mean, it's not like it isn't fucking incredible to look at. I've never seen a black sand beach before, and the effect is striking. Unfortunately, the weather was doing me no favors. Update: I just tried to do an HDR merge in photoshop, and I won't lie to you, it was fucking garish. So it'll just be regular photos, no perfectly merged masterpieces that make me look more skilled than I actually am.
It started pouring pretty immediately after I took those, so I ducked into a lava tube cavern almost directly underneath where I had been standing to take the photos. I found my delicious husband had set up shop in there ahead of me, and it was just us in there, which was nice and surprising. I attempted to bracket again, but as I am no whiz at the software, these two photos will just have to do.
I lied, you have to make do with one photo. I said one, Debbie. I had such grand ideas about how I could make this look, and unfortunately, well, unfortunately that was what I ended up with.
The best thing about Wai'anapanapa beach is getting to see all of the instagram photo shoots. There were so many. They ranged from tame family shoots to far more risque shoots with girls writhing around in the sand, smearing it all over themselves. A real grab bag of genres. Derek and I laughed about a lot of it, a lovely young family asked me to take their photos for them (I hope I got them a good enough picture! They had the cutest little boy, and they were all just so adorable), it was definitely the place to be photographed, it seemed.
And I get it.
The beach is amazing, and I feel very lucky that I got a shot where I didn't have to edit out footprints. There's something off about the color there, but I had to lift the shadows so hard to even get the rocks to show up. And there was so much rain on my lens that I had to dehaze and edit to shit, so if it looks crap, that's why.
We left Wai'anapanapa beach and headed forth towards O'heo Gulch. It kept dumping rain down on us, so when we passed by another incredible waterfall, we didn't bother getting out, because there wouldn't be a good opportunity to take a photo through the onslaught of rain. It was about a 40 minute drive to Haleakala National Park, though, so we chatted and listened to music and chatted and then, once we got into the park, I talked Derek into skipping the pools altogether. We hit up another beach along the way, and this one was a red sand beach. I mean it wasn't, but it was trying real hard to have red sand. The cliff walls had red sand, and about a mile or two down the way was the really real red sand beach, but we didn't stop there. We thought about it, but it was absolutely pouring out when we drove by the exit, and we opted to not.
Instead we took the offroad to Koki Beach. Its sand is trying really hard to be red, and in the rain, it does an alright job.
There's the old ball and chain, holding all of my lenses and being really fucking irritated by it. I can't say I blame him. Thanks, honey! I love using you as a pack mule!!!
I think the coolest thing about stopping at Koki Beach was Alau Island. I couldn't find much about Alau island other than the palm trees on the very top of it were put there as a way to commemorate loss. If you look around the top of the island, you can see the massive fuckin' grip of birds swarming all about the thing.
See? So many fucking birds. There were little boys collecting crabs in these little shallows that I parked myself in to grab these shots. Again, this was meant to be part of a photo stack, but I cannot manage those successfully yet. So the middle exposure in a set of six will have to do.
SO MANY GOD DAMN BIRDS! Tippi Hedren would be freaking the fuck out.
Another in the middle of a series of six meant to be stacked to end up as a stronger photo. Welp! I'll learn one day.
We were getting chewed alive by mosquitoes, so we got back on the road and made our way back to Hana Highway proper. As we were making our way to Haleakala National Park, we passed Waimoku Falls, and it was breathtaking. Seriously amazing. I marveled at it as we drove by, and Derek told me he was waterfalled out but he'd stop if I really wanted to, and I opted to not tell him to stop for two reasons:
Reason one: that parking lot was congestion central. It literally caused a five minute traffic jam from people waiting for a parking spot, trying to get out of parking spots, and just trying to drive straight through;
reason B: I had dictated everything we did the entire trip, and it didn't seem fair to make Derek wait for my slow ass to do something he didn't really feel like doing.
I told him to drive on, that it was fine.
Now.
I couldn't stop thinking about that fucking waterfall. It was so fucking pretty. I vocalized to Derek that it was fine to skip it, it was really just the Maui version of Manoa Falls, and I could always just go back and photograph them again if I felt inspired. The reality was the look of that falls was sticking in my craw. The entire drive through to O'heo Gulch, and the entire drive to Koki beach, abnd the entire drive back, which was no short amount of time, probably about an hour and a half plus the hour we spent photographing there, I was thinking about that waterfall. I had to photograph it. I just had to.
So when we passed it again, I saw a spot and I shouted with ferocity that Derek HAD to stop, he could stay in the car, but I was photographing that waterfall. So Derek stopped and parked, I jumped out and waited my turn for the right spot. I knew exactly where I wanted to shoot, too. I didn't even need to scope out other angles because I had the shot already. I dreamed it up and mapped it out and there was nothing else I wanted. I waited my turn behind a family that was very polite, I discussed drone prices with the dad/young grandpa (I wasn't sure which he was), and then I went up to the bridge, set up my tripod, took two shots, and left. That was all I needed.
Those are the two shots I took, I edited one a little darker than the other one, but I got it right the first time and the second shot was overkill. I won't lie, I felt boss as fuck just standing there for a minute and a half for these shots and then leaving. Like a really cool guy not looking at an explosion. I just did the damn thing.
As I was leaving, a VERY harried looking Derek fast walks up to me with extreme purchase and says quite pointedly, "WE HAVE TO GO." Since I was finished, I was like, ok, what's wrong?
Here's where Derek's afternoon fell down.
While we had been driving, Derek had been snacking on some Lay's Potato Chips. He loves them, they are his favorite, and because of that he forgets that they are not very kind to his tum tum. I asked him before he ate them if he wanted a Lactaid because sometimes Lay's fuck with him, and he said no, he doesn't remember ever having a reaction.
Bad news from the future.
While I had been waiting to take my two photos and walk away with all of the chubby tourist coolness I could muster, Derek was hiding in the woods, shitting off the edge of a precipice. Like the world's most desperate bear. I did not want to laugh in his face, but I didn't let that stop me from laughing in his face. We got in the car and booked it the fuck out of there, and I was seriously expecting Derek to have to pull over and shit somewhere again, or to explode in the car, because these are the places my head goes. The necessity to evacuate his bowels again in a densely packed tourist attraction subsided, though, and we just kept driving back toward Lahaina.
We stopped again for the view back to the black sand beach of Honomanu Bay, and we found the spot we think the app dude had been telling us existed for a perfect view of the bay. However, it was quite overgrown, so the view wasn't AS unobstructed as he promised. But it was good enough to get a shot or two.
I'm not sure how obvious it is that it's fucking pouring, but it is fucking pouring in those photos. I grabbed those two and got back in the car with the quickness, and we left Hana Highway. The drive back to Lahaina was mostly uneventful, but that side of the island was sunny and looked like it hadn't seen a single spot of rain all day. No surprise there for people who live on the islands.
The highway runs by the mountains, and the crags from all of the mechanical erosion are absolutely magical to me. I fucking love them. I had spent every single day trying to get a photograph of them, and on this day, I asked Derek to stop so I could get out and attempt to photograph them properly. We stopped, Derek parked and took a nap, and I rushed to the other side of the road to try and make a construction site look pretty enough for at LEAST a posterity shot.
It may look silly because I mean, it's just...scenery. But I am so taken with it. I didn't get the shot right, but I got it close enough. There is a really dramatic section of this, but there was no good vantage to get it from, so this was the best that I could get. I'll take it.
I went to go back to the car, but Derek was napping, and I figured he could use a little rest, so I crossed the street and tried to find a good place to set up shop to photograph the sunset. I was on this really cool pebble beach, and I had it almost all to myself. There were people about a quarter mile up the beach from me, but on a beach, I feel good about saying I was alone with distance like that.
I found the head of a lobster, and I was unsure if it had been destroyed by people or had been eaten by something in the ocean, but either way, you have to see its head, too.
I am sorry about your head, little dude.
I found this really cool, really huge piece of driftwood...or just...wood. I have no idea if it was driftwood, I will let you be the judge of what kind of wood it is.
I was trying to figure out the best way to photograph the driftwood and the sunset properly. I rushed back to the car, yelled at Derek to wake him up so I could do my due diligence in making sure he wanted to sleep through the sunset, grabbed the eight stop ND and left my tripod because I didn't fucking need it. Well, no. I didn't fucking WANT it. I wanted to play with propping up my camera on the driftwood and getting a closer shot. I do this a lot, and it's always a gamble. Sometimes it works, more often than not it doesn't. You may disagree, but I think it really paid off. \
I was so excited about these. I really had to do a lot of work for them. I had to clean my lens every single shot because the waves kept crashing up on the log and spraying all of the sea water onto it, but it gave the log such a pretty, glossy finish that really reflected the sun exactly like I wanted it to.
Here's a regular, unedited shot of the beach, just so you can see what the beach itself looked like.
And that is the end of that day. I tried to take a cool shot of our Maui rum, but I think the best shot of it is on Derek's camera, so that will have to wait for another time.
Stay fucking tuned, shit aint over yet.
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