He’s been trying to get me to go night diving for sharks
with him for years.
“Not yet,” I tell him. So instead I’m invited to a pig roast
he’s serving up later in the day.
The sweetest mango
Back down the hill, I’m cruising the main street through
Kihei, the rambling seaside town where I used to live.
Adele is on the radio singing about When We Were
Young. Thirty years earlier, along this same stretch,
Madonna belted from my radio about feeling Like a
Virgin. There were no traffic lights on this road then
— today I lose count after six. From the corner of my
eye, I spot a small, hand-painted sign and swing my car
into an unpaved parking lot. A chicken scampers across
my path, a half-dozen fuzzy offspring giving chase. Yee’s
Orchard, the sign says, is selling fresh, local mangos. A
small lady named Lorma is slicing a coconut behind the
warped, wooden countertop.
“How long has this stand been here?” I ask.
“Yee’s? Oh, I don’t know. Forever.”
I’ve driven this road hundreds and hundreds of times.
How had I never noticed it before? The mango is perhaps
the sweetest I’ve ever tasted.
I’m still shaking my head in disbelief when I pass
Ukumehame Beach. A group of young surfers are
catching their first waves in the gentle swell, just as
the generation before them did at this same beach when
I first arrived, before graduating to the big breaks like
Jaws on the north shore, just beyond the town of Paia. No
town seems to represent the evolving Maui as much as
this one-time hippie haven.
The tanned beauties and dudes with dreadlocks and
guitars hanging from their shoulders, piling out of worn-
out vans are still here, but so now is the artisanal ice
cream shop with cones being served up by the guy with
the man-bun and the girl with the full-sleeve tattoo.
Posh boutiques are displacing the tie-dye. Yet Paia is
wearing its transition to success loosely. It’s an easy
place to spend more time than you planned, but I’ve got
a craving that can only be satisfied on the other side of
the island.
Across the isthmus that connects Haleakala and
the conical volcanos that created the West Maui
Mountains, the road funnels inevitably toward Lahaina,
the island’s tourist centre. Front Street swarms, as it
always has, with red-skinned visitors in floral shirts
jockeying to get on whale-watching boats, or have
their pictures taken with rainbow-coloured parrots on
their heads. Art galleries are stocked with oversized
sculptures of noble-looking sea turtles and twisting,
smiling dolphins. You can buy prints by Picasso, or
Chagall, or Dalí, and then step next door and have a beer
at Moose McGillycuddy’s pub.
But just around the corner, a few minutes’ walk from
the sprawling banyan tree beside the docks, a vestige of
Maui’s romantic past sits virtually unnoticed. In the mid-
19th century, Lahaina was the epicentre of the whalingKeawakapu Beach, KiheiLEFT: Local bodyboarder at
Kaanapali BeachNovember 2016 97HAWAII