The Road to Nowhere

We’d learned from the guidebooks that no visit to Maui was complete without experiencing the Road to Hana. It was strongly recommended that we leave at 7:00 in the morning because 2000 vehicles traveled the road each day! Cars cruised bumper to bumper all along the road and it took several hours to reach Hana. It was a one-lane highway that was too narrow to even allow two cars to pass each other, and it had 600 sharp turns!

Clearly something miraculous took place on the Road to Hana, and we wanted to know what it was.

Apparently, one could not even attempt the “road” without stopping in Paia for coffee at Anthony’s Coffee Company. So we stopped and found that it was a cute little coffee place much like thousands of others. A little bleary eyed and with Anthony’s coffee clutched in our hands, we took our place in the sparse line of cars (it was still really early) and started our journey.

Immediately I noticed mile markers on the side of the highway and frantically thumbed through my guidebook. At mile marker 3, we were supposed to turn off to see some sort of ruin but there were no roads that led off of the twisting, one-lane highway—none! After about 15 minutes of frantic dialogue and tragic second guessing, we realized that the mile markers had started all over again and that we were back at mile zero.

Apparently we had not yet actually been on the Road to Hana.

Apparently we were now actually on the Road to Hana.

We didn’t know yet that general confusion and mind-numbing disappointment would be the themes for the day.

I flipped the pages back in the guidebook so we could start over. Unfortunately, nothing much changed on our “do over.” We missed a bunch more “scenic stops” because we couldn’t find the turn offs, and then felt faint with joy and relief when we spotted a turnout for the Waikamoi Nature Trail. At last—a spot that matched what was listed in the guidebook!

The people of Hawaii only provided parking spaces for five cars to take in this site, but one car was pulling out so we were able to stop. We felt almost giddy with a brief and misguided sense of accomplishment.

As it turned out, we walked in a big circle on a dirt forest path and soon found ourselves back at the car. The trail was mildly interesting because of the tall trees, tangled vines, and the roots that jutted up all along the forest floor. Someone placed a sign on the trail that said, “Quiet, Trees at Work.”

Back in the car, we turned off at the next marker, which was Kaumahina State Park. I learned that it was a good spot for hiking the mountain trail, but it seemed that tourists in white vans were using the stop to use the restrooms. Because of the effects of Anthony’s coffee, I joined the line of ladies moving in that direction.

I felt a little apprehensive when I saw these words painted on the stalls: “DO NOT KICK.” In a women’s bathroom? Yikes. They had also removed the garbage can, so I couldn’t imagine what mischief had been accomplished with that.

Back on the road, we realized that there were no signs at all letting one know that one was on the Road to Hana. There was no way to know where we were except for the mile markers, and those did not always coincide with what we were supposed to be seeing.

I tried to keep pace with the guidebook, but when it listed something to see, the next sentences were something like, “ill-defined pathways…slippery…best seen from a distance.”

No wonder the ads said, “Maui is yours to discover!” It’s because it is all guesswork and there are no clues.

After a million years, we found ourselves at mile marker 15, and yet it was only 9:30 in the morning. I saw in the guidebook that we would soon arrive at a “quaint seaside village” called Keanae Village. At last! We should be able to stop and there should be something to see.

And it would mark the halfway point on the Road to Hana. On the maniacally twisted, one-lane road, it had taken us four hours to get to the halfway point.

The one-lane bridges that we encountered every quarter mile also impeded us. We had to stop well ahead of the bridge and check to see if another car was coming, because if it was, that car had the right of way and we had to wait until it was clear, and then slowly try to cross the bridge. This tricky maneuver was required every five minutes or so.

We arrived in the Keanae area and took a few photos of the beautiful shoreline, then headed into the “village.” We saw the familiar white vans (carrying Road to Hana tourists) and stopped. Well, the village turned out to be one banana bread stand with a hand-painted sign that said, “Aunty Sandy’s Banana Bread.” A long line of desperate tourists waited in front of us to buy a $6 loaf of banana bread.

As Rob purchased our precious loaf, he asked about the “seaside village.” The girl behind the counter barked out a little laugh (!) and said there was nothing to see. The village was made up of three rundown bungalows. She said we should just keep moving.

So after a grueling morning, we’d seen a banana bread stand and a sign for “Uncle Harry’s Pig Tacos.”

We had no choice but to move on; we certainly had no desire to go back the way we came. To make matters worse, a couple in a convertible in front of us just loved to stop at every waterfall so the woman could take a blurry photo from the car. As though navigating the road wasn’t difficult and treacherous enough.

Rob made a joke every time, and I mean every time, we approached a one-lane bridge. He would make the words sound like a Hawaiian name and warn me that we were approaching the “Onelane” bridge (pronounced Ah-noh-lah-nay).” He wondered why all the bridges were named Onelane.

As we drove, we soon learned that Aunty Sandy’s banana bread cost $6, but at mile marker 26, banana bread only cost $2. But a different Aunty made that bread. I think it was Aunty Patty (no relation).

Then, incredibly, we arrived at what looked like a makeshift strip mall in the middle of the jungle. They had set up a string of 3-4 wooden food booths and shops in the middle of absolute nowhere.

We did sample and buy some delicious coconut shavings that a man named “Coconut Willy” had slow roasted with cane sugar. Delicious! We only bought two bags but should have bought a lot more. Those coconut shavings were the highlight of our day!

After many hours (I think 100), we saw a sign that said we had arrived in Hana. We saw another sign that said, “Slow Children at Play.” We thought it was unfortunate that the slow children had to play on the highway. We wondered if the brighter children played at the playground.

In total desperation, we tried to figure out what was at Hana that made it worth traveling on a hellish one-lane road for six hours. But as far as we could tell, Hana was made up of a general store, a gift shop, a hotel, and a lady standing on the corner, waving to everyone, who was selling “hand-made” popsicles. Don’t you just put a stick in liquid and you have a popsicle?

The quirky woman at the gift shop told us that we were lucky we had not come the week before because they had torrential rain and flash floods all week.

She related, grimly, “It rained so hard my goat wouldn’t bleat.”

We nodded, sympathetically. You hate when that happens.

The other “huge” attraction was a general store that had been there about 100 years (no exaggeration this time). The guidebooks recommended that we leave plenty of time to explore the store because we would likely want to spend a full day in there.

So we gamely entered the store and had a look around. Yes, it was a general store all right, and carried items that would typically be carried in a general store. We found we didn’t need a full day to explore the general store.

Last, we had to visit the Hana beach because, apparently, the ex-Beatle George Harrison lived in Hana at the end of his life and often played his guitar at that beach. It was honestly the ugliest beach I had ever seen (black sand, small, bordered by a bathroom and a cement boat launch area).

At that point, our only desire was to get the hell out of Hana. But to escape from Hana, one had to buy gas, and one had to pay Hana’s gas prices at Hana’s one gas station. So we paid $20 for three gallons of gas! Just to get the hell out.

The Road Fleeing Hana (as I quickly renamed it) was built in 1910 and it looked like it. That road was even more narrow and more harrowing than the road to Hana. We had to stop abruptly to let a weasel cross the road (!) and our $6 banana bread fell on the floor of the car.

We actually stopped at a waterfall because the white tourist vans (the vans were white, not the tourists, though some were) had also stopped, and Rob climbed down a ravine so I could get a photo of him kind of at the foot of the waterfall. If he’d fallen, his body would never have been recovered.

As we drove along the south end of the island, we eyed the sheer cliffs that dropped down to the sea to our left. The only signs we saw warned of rocks that might fall on top of us from the volcanic mountains to our right. Just when we thought the road couldn’t be in worse shape, we saw a sign that said, “Narrow and Winding—Next 7 Miles.” Impossible!

The guidebook said we would run across Lindbergh’s grave, but there was no humanly possible way to find it. It turned out the grave was in a churchyard somewhere, off of a side road, that was not marked on the “highway.”

We did see a Catholic church built in 1862 called St. Joseph’s. I found that interesting because I could see the ruins of the “Rectory,” which was a small stone building about 10 feet by 10 feet. The roof was gone but I could imagine the priest living in that tiny building on that windy cliff, just 20 feet from the church.

Back on the Road Fleeing Hana, we discussed how they should post strongly worded signs all along the road saying that only accomplished drivers should even attempt it. We imagined people dying daily on that road, though no emergency vehicles could reach them.

The landscape now looked like the surface of the moon—all volcanic rock and tufts of dry grass. The road only became more treacherous and frightening as time passed. In many places, the curve was sharp and blind, and you actually had to honk to let any other cars know you were approaching. Or we’d come up over a hill not knowing if we would hit another car head on because the road was only wide enough for one car at the peak.

At one stretch, the road should have been straight because the landscape was, but it zigzagged anyway! What was happening??

Then we were almost run off the road by a gang of scruffy men on quad motorcycles. We saw them turn off at a small, wooden shack on a bluff overlooking the ocean. The sign outside the shack said “Bully’s Burgers—the freshest meat in town!” And no wonder—cows meandered along the “highway” for miles. I commented that when one was hit by a car, it would immediately become a Bully’s Burger.

At long last, we arrived at a spot on the island where we should have been able to cut across to Kihei (to where we were staying), but no. The 1000 people who live “up country” on Maui don’t want the rest of the population to have easy access to their sacred turf, so (because there was no way to cut across), we had to drive all the way up to the north end of the island and then turn and travel south to Kihei. That added another two hours to the drive.

We had no choice but to drive around the whole damned island, almost back to the spot where we started. After ten full hours of driving, we barely made it back to Kihei before it was dark. And we started on the Road to Nowhere at 7:00 that morning. Anyone caught on those roads after dark was a goner; of that we were positive.

Over a Thai dinner, we took deep breaths and resolved never to attempt anything like that again. We nibbled on the roasted coconut shavings that we bought from Coconut Willy and acknowledged that even those couldn’t make up for the horror (well, maybe a little; they were delicious!).

Rob commented that all we had to show for everything we’d been through that day was a tiny, half-eaten loaf of banana bread and a few shards of coconut.

“And our lives,” I reminded him, grimly. “And our lives.”