Hawaii – Locals and Roads
Welcome to Maui. Land of tropical pleasures, amazing landscapes, twisted crazy roads, and fantastic culture. Come for fruity drinks with umbrellas and food that may remind you of a 1950’s drive-in, complete with as much fat and cholesterol as you could possibly want in your vacation food. Leave because the locals hate you.
Any lovely evening at a luau should be enough to educate you about a bit of Hawaiian history and would teach about 100s of years of history and mythology before Hawaii became the 50th United State in 1959. If that weren’t enough, they enjoyed a generally well managed monarchy until we (the USA) came in and abolished it all. In their minds, generally speaking, this was not an excellent day for them. (August 21st, 1959 to be exact.)
Don’t get me wrong here, not all of the locals are bitter and angry. A vast portion of them are actually very friendly. Those tend to be the ones that either understand basic economics or at least work for someone that does. People of Hawaiian decent that are near a resort are likely to be some of the friendliest people you’ve ever met. Travel out into the middle of no where and all bets are off.
No where is this more true than on the Road to Hana. This particular road clocks in at a mere 52 miles in length but offers the sadistic driver almost three hours of driving in each direction and yes, if you drive it once you have almost no choice but to drive it back later. Each pass of this road includes 620 turns, 59 bridges (46 of which are only one lane) and hundreds of stretches of one lane road with “yield to oncoming traffic” signs and no indication of where that oncoming traffic could be coming from.
Our trip lasted almost exactly seven hours, put us through double the number of one lane bridges, turns, and miles and subjected us to raw hatred without cause. Not typically what you would expect to hear about a well known tourist attraction I suppose, but as I mentioned before, the locals hate you. I can only imagine that they hate that it takes you three hours to drive the road they would rather complete in one, and they hate that you personally abolished their kingdom and forced being a state down their throats. Locals are often as easy to recognize as you are as a tourist. You are the couple in a rented car driving at generally sane speeds, they are the seven people in a single rusted white pickup truck that literally yell and swear at you as you go by or nearly run you off the road as they pass you in the middle of turns 375 and 376. Whatever gene it is that allows someone to think it is a good idea to pass you in a one lane road full of twists and turns, I find myself quite glad to have evolved beyond possessing it.
If the nausea, screaming headache, and general exhaustion wasn’t bad enough the destructive emotional force of unwarranted hatred left me a bit depressed for almost the whole next day. My advice to you is to go to Maui for all the good things, eat cheeseburgers with high calorie toppings, drink silly looking drinks with fruits you’ve never even heard of, and to skip the Road to Hana entirely. The drive sucked, the locals are mean and angry, the view while interesting was not at all unique after the 400th turn, and when people tell you there is nothing in Hana at all they are being kind to the town as a whole. Nothing doesn’t begin to describe what was waiting for us at the half way point of seven hours of hell.
There was literally a police station, a resort you aren’t allowed on, and a general store. If you are looking for more than that, you are wasting your time, it’s just not there. We had heard there was nothing in Hana, but as the destination of a massive tourist trap we figured there would at least be a little something to do. We were flat wrong.