Hana: Good Things in Small Packages

Time for another family adventure: my mother came out for a short jaunt to Hana and I joined her. I really enjoy traveling with my family and I consider us to be pretty close. That all changed when I saw this at the Honolulu Airport and realized that some families are WAY closer than we'll ever be:

Yep, that's a bathroom. It's located right between the men's and the ladies'. Even the sign looks crowded and sort of akward.

So, to get to the airline that takes all four daily passengers to Hana, you have to walk waaaaay past the international and domestic terminals to the end of the dinky inter-island terminal to the beensy little airline. When we walked up to the counter they handwrote our tickets and then handed us each a bottle of water- I figured that was to soften the blow of the next step of check in: they ask you point-blank what your bodyweight is. Yeah, the airplane is that small.


They didn't actually announce our weight to the other passengers, but you got the picture when they got us all out on the tarmac and then called us each by name and told us where we'd be sitting. This would be a good place for Jenny Craig to recruit. They should just have a booth right there on the landing strip.

When we got on the cute little plane our pilot was Mr. Comedian. I think pilots must have a fun life soaring through the clouds all day, cracking jokes on the loudspeaker, and watching life below become really small. It sort of puts things in perspective. We zipped over a couple of rainclouds and that was really nice. That said, I just sort of had to trust that he knew what he was doing, because we had a sort of disconcerting sight in the middle of the flight. Maybe this happens in big planes, too, but you just don't see it and therefore think that your pilot has their attention on nothing but your safety at all moments:


The view from the plane was amazing. Maui has lots of remote waterfalls that spill off of cliffs:


There was a small moment of panic when we landed in Hana, because the runway ends in the ocean:


Luckily, the brakes worked fine, and we deplaned and made our way over to the airport, which was about the size of a quarter:


Inside, we talked to the airport employee (yes, there's just one) and got a rental car figured out. She'd just gotten back from her lunch break, during which time the airport is just sort of sitting there doing its own thing with no employees. I did also see another airport worker performing a necessary service, but he didn't work inside:

Yes, that really is a man weed-whacking the runway we'd just landed on.

We drove to our cottage and saw this cute baby pineapple:


Across the street there were lots of little fruit stands selling the kinds of things that fall off of trees here.
The fruitstands are even less populated than the airport (read: zero employees) so they each have a little cash box and use the honor system:

For the record: I am just showing what I saw and I personally find Canadian coinage to be just as honorable as coins from the good old USA.

We went out to one of the two restaurants in town to grab a bite to eat and saw this sign in the outdoor seating area:

I was confused by it until we sat down and a motley assortment of birds appeared out of nowhere to beg for an onion ring. This included a street gang of hard-living roosters who strutted and tried to boss my mother into giving them a piece of her lunch. That struck me as funny until I put it together that she was eating teriyaki chicken, which is just really gross for them to want to eat:


Along with the two restaurants Hana boasts a post office, two tiny grocery stores, and the smallest bank I've ever seen:

That sign in the window lets you know that the town's ATM is located at the store across the street, just in case you missed the convenient one and a half hour time slot that the bank is open each day.

That afternoon, we visited a home outside of Hana. This is really random, but they had Richard Pryor's old bathtub in their yard:

It's a long story, but apparently he used to have a home in Hana and when it was torn down somebody's somebody was friends with the plumber or something, and these folks got the tub to eventually use as a huge flowerpot. The point of all of this is that Richard Pryor's bathtub has THIS view from where it sits:

Which just proves to me that celebrities are on such a higher plane of existence that even their bathtubs get to retire in luxury. It seems a little unfair.

We stopped by a beach on our way home, and saw this elaborate sandcastle:

Someone took the seed pods from a nearby tree and drew eyes on them to create this "Aliens-landing-on-medieval-castle" tableau. I think it works well.

As if Hana itself were not cute enough, they had to also have this car for sale.

I mean, an MG Midget with "Toy Car" on the plates? I almost went into cuteness convulsions, but managed pulled out of it in time to make it to the next beach:

The black sand is a really striking effect, but made my skin look even more greenish and pale than usual:


The black sand beach had these awesome warning signs, you get to see the guy who fell off the volcano cliff in our last episode meet a variety of other kinds of certain doom:

Even worse:

This looks bad too:


Here you can see that the best defense against jellyfish is an akward disco dance move:

The same maneuver works on Man-o-wars:


With all of this danger down at the beach, you can see why in ancient times, before warning signs, they'd have a lot of casualties and just have to bury them right on the spot. This sign is nestled between all the warning signs:


Here we have a sign that does not have any warnings, but seems like maybe it should:

I mean, a picnic area in a cave under a restroom? Maybe not the best idea. And "Ancient Burial Airport?" seems less than lucky to me. Not to mention the lava tube.

Despite all of this DANGER, my mother mustered up a sweet story to tell me about some of the flowers on the beach. She had just read a Hawaiian legend about the flowers:

These flowers grow just like this, and represent people, as we are only half a flower:

Until we meet our perfect match:

When we become a whole flower.

We stayed at our cottage that night, and in the morning we went back to town. We went to the same lunch spot, saw the same roosters, saw the same people, saw the exact same guy ride by on his bike at the same time time the other guy with the loud stereo drove by to go to work. It was like Groundhog Day. I guess that's life in such a small small town.

Consoled by the fact that we wouldn't be missing anything, we headed back to the airport. When we arrived, we discovered two tourists who had been stranded on the road in a broken-down car using the Airport's phone. The employee came back from lunch just then, and gave them a piece of her mind about using official airport equipment. I think walking down the jungle road hunting for a pay phone when there was a completely empty one-room airport for the using seemed counterintuitive to the stranded couple.

I was a little concerned when I looked around the airport (didn't take long) and noticed that there were no metal detectors anywhere. I wondered how exactly they'd check if we were safe to fly. Luckily (I guess) there just wasn't any search. We got lined up in a row again, and one of the pilots just guessed our weight by yelling it out and pointing, like a carnival worker. He was pretty accurate, and at least we got to share the humiliation as a group.

On our flight back, we got an enormous 8-seater plane and TWO pilots. That was a good thing, because the main pilot had a big cast on. I was momentarily worried about that, but my mother pointed out that only one hand is really needed to properly read a newspaper. What a relief.


The trip to Hana made Honolulu look like a big city to me for the first time. When we landed at the airport, I tried to walk back in toward the terminal where we came in, but the pilots waved me away and ushered us toward the back door, a gate in a chain-link fence. It seemed kind of unceremonius, but apparently the point of that was for us to pass through "security" on our way out, which was a tiny shed off in the distance. Our screening consisted of the security worker standing up and looking at us from inside the shed.

I guess they all feel comfortable that the biggest danger in Hana is not going to be found on the planes, it's all safely stowed away at the black sand beach.