The Road to Hana and My Swim

Hana is a small fishing village on the other side of Maui. Oddly enough, the road to Hana is the destination, not Hana, itself. I didn't understand this until we started on the journey and the landscape changed drastically to a tropical rain forest.

We took along with us a CD tour that came from the same place as the snorkel gear, Molikini tour and we were still scheduled for our timeshare presentation the following day. I will admit that this particular CD tour was not up to par. Still, it gave us a good starting point and a lot of laughs. For instance, in one part of the CD, the guide gives us a mile marker post and indicates a general store. We passed a portable trailer. But we learned the history of the mongoose on the island which was to control the rat population. A crate of mongoose arrived and were freed. Unfortunately, the mongoose (mongeese?) and the rats have different sleeping schedules. Now Maui suffers from both rats and mongoose infestation.

Our first interesting stop was a place where the path was blocked off with a concrete wall. This screamed ENTER to me so I climbed atop a side wall and stepped around it. Scott helped me up and cut his hand on the barbed wire. Regardless of the barbed wire, heavy cement wall, I felt pulled to this spot.

"Are you going in?" I asked Scott. He looked at me like I was a lunatic. I mean more than usual. "I'm going in," I announced.

"I'll take pictures," he replied. He didn't really believe I was going in.

It went like this:

So I'm thinking about strategy. How to get to the waterfall? I'm going to have to swim. I don't think about what creatures might be under me and I swim.

The white space above is for the picture that I will not include. This is the undignified climbing up onto the rocks. Scott took a close up of my stance. Mostly it is of my butt. We'll skip that one but be assured that he is laughing on the other side of the pool.

Now we have a problem. The objective was to get to the waterfall. I am stuck on one side and unable to cross. I make attempts for about 5 minutes before I finally fall. 

So I swim across. By now I really am wondering what creatures lurk beneath me. It is not a pleasant place to be in my mind at this moment.

I make it to the other side, climb up and stand under the falls.

I included this picture because it looks like I am readying myself to make a beautiful and graceful dive back into the pool. The reality is that I scooted further down the rock, crouched low then made a very shallow dive.

and swam back - back stroke. It was all in the name of saying I did it.

Am I glowing from accomplishment? I think I'm glowing.

It could just be my pasty complexion but we're calling it glowing.