Maui Attractions

The drive from sea level to 10,023 feet at Puʻu ʻUlaʻula takes about ninety minutes from Kahului and climbs through four climate zones in thirty-odd switchbacks. The reward at the top is a seven-mile-wide erosional basin floored with cinder cones in rust, ochre and black, and on a clear morning the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on Hawaiʻi Island appear above the cloud deck a hundred miles off.

Three things are consistently undersold. The ʻāhinahina, the Haleakalā silversword, grows nowhere else on the planet, lives for decades as a silver rosette and then flowers once and dies; the ones beside the Kalahaku overlook are the easiest to see without hiking. The Keoneheʻeheʻe trail, usually called Sliding Sands, drops into the basin from the visitor centre and is the closest thing on earth to walking on another planet, with the catch that every step down is a step back up at altitude. And sunset from the rim is almost as extraordinary as sunrise, needs no reservation, and has a fraction of the crowd.

Dress for it properly. Dawn temperatures at the summit are regularly in the 30s Fahrenheit with wind on top, and visitors arrive in shorts every single morning. The air holds roughly a third less oxygen than at sea level, so headaches and breathlessness are common, and the park advises against going up within 24 hours of scuba diving.

The Haleakalā page covers the reservation mechanics; the sunrise guide covers the booking windows in detail.

East Maui gets its own weather. The windward slope catches the trades, Hāna receives several times the rainfall of Kīhei, and the vegetation changes from kiawe scrub to rainforest within an hour's drive.

Twin Falls at the start of the road is the first stop most people make and sits on working farm land, so it is a privilege rather than a right. Waiʻānapanapa State Park is the one that needs a booked slot: Pāʻiloa's black sand is ground lava, the sea caves are genuinely cold, and the old Piʻilani coastal trail runs along the cliff over blowholes. Kahanu Garden at ʻUlaʻino holds Piʻilanihale Heiau, the largest ancient temple platform in Polynesia, an engineering work of stacked stone that predates European contact by centuries. It is a sacred place with limited opening days, and it deserves more than a photo stop.

Hāna Bay is the town's centre, with Kaʻuiki Head above it, the cinder cone associated with the birthplace of Queen Kaʻahumanu. Past Hāna the road continues to Wailua Falls, which drops beside the highway and is the most photographed waterfall on Maui, and then to the Kīpahulu district of the national park.

That is where ʻOheʻo Gulch is, a stepped series of pools running to the sea. The name "Seven Sacred Pools" is a marketing invention and there are more than seven. Swimming is frequently closed for rockfall and flash-flood risk, so check at the ranger station rather than assuming. The Pipiwai Trail starts from the same car park and is the best hike on Maui that does not require altitude: four miles round trip, about 800 feet of climb, past a vast banyan, through a bamboo forest that clatters in the wind, and out at the base of Waimoku Falls, which drops roughly 400 feet down a sheer wall.

ʻĪao Valley State Monument is ten minutes from Wailuku and one of the most significant places on the island. Kūkaʻemoku, the green pinnacle usually called the ʻĪao Needle, stands about 1,200 feet above the valley floor in a rainforest amphitheatre carved out of the West Maui caldera.

It is also a battlefield. In 1790 Kamehameha I defeated Maui's forces here at Kepaniwai, a name that translates as the damming of the waters, because the stream was blocked by the dead. Hawaiians treat the valley as a burial ground and a place of consequence. It reads as a short paved walk to a lookout, and it is worth arriving knowing what happened here.

Non-residents need an advance reservation, with parking charged per vehicle and a per-person entry fee on top. Go early: the valley cloud in by late morning most days, and the Needle disappears into it.

Wailuku town below it has had a quiet revival along Market Street, with antique shops, a handful of good restaurants and the Bailey House Museum in a missionary-era building. Maui Tropical Plantation at Waikapū runs a tram through working orchards and has a zipline course over the fields, which makes it one of the few genuinely rainy-day-resistant stops in the middle of the island. And Maui Ocean Center at Māʻalaea, fifteen minutes south, is the island's reliable indoor half-day, with a walk-through reef tunnel and a humpback exhibit that makes more sense after you have been out in the channel.

The slopes above Pāʻia are the part of Maui that resort visitors drive past on the way to somewhere else, and the part that people who move here tend to live in.

Pāʻia was a sugar town and then a windsurfing town, and it is now the last real supermarket, petrol station and breakfast before the Hāna Highway begins. The Mantokuji Buddhist temple at the east end of town, with its cemetery facing the sea, is the plantation era still standing.

Twenty minutes up Baldwin Avenue, Makawao is paniolo country. Hawaiian cowboys were working cattle on these slopes in the 1830s, decades before the American West had an industry, and the town still has wooden storefronts, a rodeo arena and a Fourth of July rodeo that is a local event rather than a show.

Higher again, Kula sits around 3,000 feet where the air is cool and the farms grow protea, onions, coffee and lavender. Aliʻi Kula Lavender has a hillside of it with a view down across the isthmus to the West Maui Mountains, and Kula Botanical Garden is a well-kept eight acres of native and introduced planting. The road continues out to Maui Wine at ʻUlupalakua, on ranch land that King Kalākaua used to visit, where the tasting room is the old ranch manager's cottage and the pineapple wine is better than it sounds.

Two practical arguments for Upcountry. It removes forty minutes from a 3am summit drive if you stay up here. And on a hot, crowded south-shore afternoon it is fifteen degrees cooler with nobody in it.