Beach and Lava
First off, I had to comment on how sweet this hotel (Hotel Wailea) has been. It's visually pretty cool, with things like this big circular lobby:
…or viewed from down below:
The building is open to the outside. There are glass partial walls in all of these..but a slit that runs all the way around that is totally open to the outside. The gym is the same way: a round building (like a miniature version of the above) that looks out towards the ocean, open to the air. The temperatures here have been low 70s-mid 80s, so the open air thing works much better than it would at home! (It was 106 in Austin the day before we left)
The pool gets some nice lighting at night, and is actually open 24/7…although the bar is not manned 24×7, so it clears out in the evenings.
After spending a lot of yesterday around the hotel (lots of drinks at the pool), we did venture out to the beach in the mid afternoon. It was crazy windy…enough that the staff had taken the umbrellas down. Apparently, on this part of the island…this is how it is every day. It is calm in the morning, and then ramps up to constant strong winds in the afternoon (with commensurate choppy water), and back to calm in the evening. We only stuck around the beach for maybe half an hour yesterday, deciding that we'd come back Tuesday morning, knowing this daily pattern. The hotel is not on the beach itself, but rather a short (~3 minute, I'd guess) car ride down the hill to Wailea Beach, which is public. It's sandwiched between the Grand Wailea and the Four Seasons, but Hotel Wailea has an arrangement with one of the rental companies on the beach that allows us to just show up and they'll give us water and set up umbrellas and lounge chairs.
After talking to the pool bartender yesterday, we booked an Italian place in Wailea for dinner called Matteo's.
It was quite good and lived up to the billing from the bartender and the reviews we'd seen on Yelp and OpenTable. I think they have been using a Coravin, as they had ~60 wines available by the glass, which let me try a nicer Barolo and a Super Tuscan that would normally not be on a restaurant's per-glass list. Their Tiramisu got the thumbs up from Kelly; ordering that at an Italian restaurant is akin to how people order kung pao at a Chinese place or pad Thai at a Thai place as a benchmark.
Our plan for this morning was to venture out for breakfast (as we did room service yesterday morning), which led us to go to a place called The Cinnamon Roll in Kihei. It was a pretty good Yelp find: cheap, and with a very good (and huge) cinnamon roll covered in macadamia nuts and cream cheese icing, along with some bacon and egg breakfast sandwiches. We'd taken our rental car out for the first time to get there..and so just drove ourselves to Wailea Beach after breakfast.
Going this morning, it was totally different…very calm waters, with a lot of people out on stand up paddle boards.
We had them set up some chairs and we stuck around this time, spending most of the morning there.
There were some outrigger canoes right next to us that we assume were available for rent; the staff carted them away at some point, so someone must have actually used them.
We turned to Yelp again to find lunch, and went to a sports-heavy gastropub in Wailea called Pint & Cork, which turned out to be great as well. I wish all places considering themselves 'sports bars' had octopus on the menu for me to order!
After lunch, we headed to something Kelly had read about in one of the guide books…the 'lava fields'. This is a part of the island that remains pretty much totally covered in black lava rocks from the last eruption in the area (a few hundred years ago). It's only 6 or 7 miles from the hotel, but it took probably 25 minutes to drive there, as much of it is a narrow road that just barely allows two cars to pass in opposite directions, and has a really low speed limit. There isn't much there, just a parking lot where you can then hike a 3 mile trail through part of the area. One of the hotel staff though it was super cool and not to be missed, and one of the hotel shuttle drivers said 'it is a bunch of rocks, I guess. I haven't been. But yes, it's there.'
It goes on like this for miles, I think.
Some is pretty sharp and craggy.
Kelly was a trooper, walking probably 20-30 minutes along the path before calling to turn around. This was a very open part that looks no worse than the Town Lake trail, but much of it is much narrower and involves walking over a bunch of uneven black lava rock that crumbles a bit as you put step onto it.
The rocks make for some almost-black-sand-beaches in parts…but I don't think you're allowed to swim in this area anyway. We did not see anyone in the water at all, although there were plenty of other hikers on the trail. It is apparently possible to rent horses to take the trail too; we saw the horses near the parking lot, and saw plenty of 'evidence' of their presence on the trail. Some places have bursts of white rocks (some looking like coral, actually) mixed in:
Some woman offered to take our picture, so here you see us not too long before turning back around. I took a number of pictures with my 7D, but discovered one problem; I inadvertently left my filters at home, which means that I don't have the polarizer for my main lens (the 17-55) with me, nor for the new 70-200 that Kelly and the rest of my family banded together and got me around the holidays that I brought. A polarizer is pretty useful when shooting landscapes with water like this, cutting down the glare on the surface. Luckily, the 10-18 wide angle lens I have with me had its polarizer left on…so nearly all of the photos taken the rest of the hike were with that wide-only lens.
After getting back to the hotel from the lava fields, we've had some down time before our dinner at a nearby restaurant called the Monkey Pod. We did hit a nice little grocery before getting back, stocking up on some stuff for breakfast (our room has a small fridge to keep it in) and some wine for this evening. As I started writing this, the sun had recently set here, with the view from our back patio looking like this:
Tomorrow, we're going to have breakfast in the room and try to get back to the beach early (when it's nice and smooth). That will give us a little bit of quality time before we have to come back to the hotel and pack up and check out, as tomorrow is when we will check out of Hotel Wailea and drive to Kapalua to check into the Ritz, where we'll be staying for the last half of the week. Updates soon!