Maui no ka oi…. Maui is the best, as the hawaiian say. So true. Maui has it all, it’s big enough so that it isn’t crowded and it’s small enough that one can go to every part of the island in at most two hours drive, laid back people, a nice warm but not too hot climate year round and warm water, nice sandy beaches, coral riffs, palm trees, green rainforests, tropical fruit, marine wildlife, a 3000m high (sleeping) volcano mountain which even gets snow at times, wind, waves and we could go on and on and on….

So it didn’t take us much after we arrived to realize we needed to extend our planned time here, just because we can, and why not ;-). Of course this came at the expense of other plan changes, so we more or less cancelled our time in mainland USA and decided to stay a little bit more in Maui and then a little bit longer in Canada (our last destination). That left us with three wonderful weeks on our favourite hawaiian island where we rented an apartment, a car, and two surfboards – what else could we possibly need??? 😀

Maui has beautiful seaside resorts just next to some of the most beautiful beaches of the island – and of the country…. but to get the most out of this paradise you really need to drive around. There is so much to see and do and so many diverse landscapes: the windward side of the island gets rain daily while other places are very dry, there was even a bushfire one day… This contrast of sun and rain allows for plenty of rainbows. So by adding up all trips we did, we were once in every place around the island and even on top, and managed to see pretty much everything (with the exception of the small part of the island which is only reachable by unpaved road and is not covered by car rental companies) and saw the diversity ot this island – you get to enjoy it in just 150 pictures 🙂 !

Of course we have not been driving around like crazy all the time: some of our favourite activities were lying at the beach, sunbathing, barbecuing, and – of course – surfing! Maui is known for its huge winter waves hitting the north shore, while in summer (right now) it is usually and luckily quite flat and windy. Nevertheless, after a few days with no wind nor waves, some nice summer swell hit the southern Maui coasts and lasted for most of the time we were on the island providing first small and later bigger and bigger waves (almost too big for us since we started off just a bit more than beginners after our first days in Bali earlier on this trip 😉 ). That helped to make us spend a lot of time in the warm blue waters together with our friends the hawaiian sea turtles 🙂 and eventually get a nice suntan.