Maui is the second largest of the Hawaiian Islands and, by most measures, the most diverse — a single island that contains within its 727 square miles a dormant volcano whose summit rises to nearly 3,000 metres, a rainforest so dense it receives more than 380 inches of rainfall annually, a desert of cinder cones on its southern flank, and a coastline of such variety that it encompasses black-sand beaches, red-sand coves, white-sand crescents of international renown, and the kind of raw, wave-beaten cliffs that remind you the Pacific is the largest ocean on earth. To speak of Maui as a beach destination is to describe a symphony as background music. It is, in the full sense of the word, a world.
The Road to Hana
There is no more beautiful drive in the United States than the Hana Highway, and very few more beautiful in the world. The road winds for 52 miles along the northeastern coast of Maui, crossing more than 50 bridges — many of them single-lane, built of stone in the 1910s — through a landscape of escalating improbability. Waterfalls appear around corners without warning: the Twin Falls you can walk to in minutes, the Wailua Falls that plunge 80 feet into a pool of impossible green, the Three Bears Falls whose triple cascade can be heard before it is seen. The bamboo forest of the Pipiwai Trail, which leads to the 400-foot Waimoku Falls through a forest of giant bamboo that sways and clicks in the wind with a sound unlike anything in the ordinary world — this is one of the great short hikes in American nature.
Hana itself is a village of deliberate smallness, a community that has resisted the development pressures that have transformed the western coast of Maui, and its reward is an authenticity rare in the Hawaiian Islands. The Travaasa Hana resort, set on 66 acres above Hana Bay, is the kind of property that makes the destination: unhurried, deeply Hawaiian in its sensibility, its rooms opening to the sound of the ocean and the smell of plumeria.
The Summit of Haleakalā
The experience of watching the sunrise from the summit of Haleakalā — the volcano whose name translates as “House of the Sun” — is one that a surprising number of Maui visitors undertake and an equally surprising number describe as among the most affecting experiences of their travelling lives. The drive to the 10,023-foot summit begins in darkness, the road climbing through successive ecosystems — tropical forest giving way to scrubland, scrubland giving way to the lunar landscape of the crater itself — to arrive at a summit where the temperature is dramatically below that of the coast and where, as the sky begins to lighten, a sea of clouds lies below you, the other islands visible as dark shapes above the cloud line.
The crater itself — 7 miles across, 2,600 feet deep, its floor studded with cinder cones in shades of red and ochre and grey — is one of the strangest landscapes in the United States, a place that feels like the beginning of things rather than the product of geological processes that are, in volcanic terms, relatively recent.
Molokini and the Underwater World
The crescent of Molokini, a partially submerged volcanic crater sitting three miles off the coast of Maui, is one of the most celebrated snorkelling and diving sites in the Pacific. Its sheltered interior — the lagoon formed by the crater’s remaining arc — provides calm, exceptionally clear water above a reef of considerable biodiversity. Reef whitetip sharks rest on the sandy bottom. Schools of raccoon butterflyfish move in formations of yellow and black. The outer wall of the crater drops steeply to depth, and it is here, for the scuba diver, that the larger pelagic species — hammerheads, eagle rays, occasionally whale sharks during the right season — make their appearances.
The Secluded West
The northwestern tip of Maui, the Kapalua and Nāpili area, has long been the island’s most discreet address. The Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea on the southern coast is the standard-bearer of the island’s luxury accommodation — its service impeccable, its position above Wailea Beach among the finest on the island — but those seeking greater seclusion find it at the Montage Kapalua Bay or at the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua, set among 54 acres of former pineapple plantation above three bays whose waters are protected marine preserves.
The Kahakuloa Valley, accessible only by a single-lane road of some challenge, rewards the effort with a landscape of almost theatrical drama: a coastal valley of taro fields and ancient Hawaiian settlement sites, its entrance marked by the 636-foot Kahakuloa Head sea stack rising from the surf. This is Maui before the hotels arrived, preserved by its own inaccessibility.
The Nature of This Island
What Maui ultimately offers the discerning traveller is the experience of a place that has not been entirely tamed by its own popularity — that retains, in its eastern rainforests and volcanic summits and hidden valleys, a wildness that the western resort strip has not reached. The island’s greatest pleasures are not those of the hotel pool or the luau but of the early morning on a summit above the clouds, the afternoon in a sea cave on the road to Hana, the moment when a humpback whale breaches within sight of shore and the ocean asserts its primacy over everything human beings have constructed along its edges.