I somehow managed to wake up early enough to catch the sunrise and even though it wasn’t all *that* spectacular, I’ll take it. Brian sat with me for a few minutes and then went back to bed, that was allowed. We lazily made our way to breakfast at the hotel and then hit the road to Haleakala National Park. The road to Hana back here gets way worse, incredibly. Significantly curvier and more narrow. Still a spot to pull over to catch a waterfall. This one is Wailua falls.
It was about a 20 minute ride to Haleakala. We then hiked the Pipiwai Trail, which I had incredibly high expectations for and was looking to be the highlight of the trip for me and I’m happy to report it far exceeded them.
About a half mile in you reach waterfall number 1. Again it had rained over night so there was an awesome flow.
You come across a really big Banyan tree a little bit further.
Another small-ish waterfall.
A beautiful bridge leading into a bamboo forrest with, you guessed it, another waterfall.
Then you treck for what had to have been 3/4 of a mile through a bamboo forrest. It was incredible and the wind made the sound of the bamboo so cool.
And eventually you get to this sky-high waterfall called Waimoku falls. Because of the recent rain I imagine the falls on the left started flowing.
The picture of course doesn’t do it justice but it’s 200′.
And we made our way back down stopping for more pics to savor the moments and to listen to the bamboo. So incredible!
That about wrapped up Haleakala, so we made our way back to Wainapanapa State Park. We stopped at one beach somewhere and got a better pic of the offshore island. It has a coconut palm on top, it was rumored to be planted by a father who lost his son in a war and planted it in his memory.
On our way back things got dicier on the road- we were finally kinda opposing a lot of traffic since we got to Pipiwai early since we were right in Hana and left relatively early. So we encountered a ton of cars going back, and the parking lot was nearly full. There was one point where these 2 20 YOs and us were stuck and they refused to go in reverse. Brian claims he was in the right and went through first, I was too busy looking around… we somehow managed to squeeze by but after that I pretty much made the decision we’d go back the way we came out of Hana as opposed to completing the circle.
Anyway, that was our only mishap, crazily and thankfully. Besides other people clearly not yielding… We found our way to Wainapanapa!
The Shaka app raved about this park, but to me it was kinda like eh just another black sand beach. There were some cool features, like this rock arch and lava tube to the ocean. Those people were in there for at least five minutes trying to take the perfect Instagram photo, so I just took a photo of them and left.
We did a walk around the coast for a bit, but we were already a bit tired from all the hiking earlier so we didn’t do the full thing. Just enough to get a taste and a better view of the bay.
And another small black sand inlet.
We also really weren’t wearing the right shoes for a long walk. So we called it and it was already around 3pm at this point and went back to the hotel to enjoy drinks at the pool.
And just some time on our Lanai together.
And that concludes day 2!