Maui Adventure - Day 6: The Garden With No Flowers

[Composed 1/6/2026]

A Garden With No Flowers

The first surprise is how it feels. Spacious, manicured, serene — an oasis of calm on a Road to Hāna that is otherwise narrow, winding, and packed with everyone else's rental car. For most of our visit we had something close to the whole place to ourselves; I doubt we saw ten other people.

The second surprise took me longer to put my finger on. I kept feeling like something was missing, and eventually it clicked: there are almost no flowers. No orchids, no roses, no showpiece beds engineered to make you gasp.

That's not an oversight. Kahanu is an ethnobotanical garden — a unit of the National Tropical Botanical Garden — and the organizing idea is that every plant here is a working plant. Not decoration. Tools, food, medicine, materials. The coconut palm, the "tree of life," good for nearly everything. A native hala forest, whose leaves are woven into sails and mats. Long beds of taro in their tidy lava-rock borders.

Take the breadfruit. Kahanu holds the largest breadfruit collection on earth — somewhere around 150 varieties. I've had a soft spot for breadfruit ever since Puerto Rico, so standing under it, fruit hanging overhead like green lanterns, was a small thrill all its own.

None of which is to say these plants are shabby to look at. Tell me the banana plant — that improbable purple blossom, those fruit stacked in tidy rows up the stalk — wasn't designed by Dr. Seuss himself. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I found plenty of it here.

Our one garden was really two. Same grounds, same hour — and Shira and I each walked out having been on a completely different trip.

For Shira: A Vacation On Her Vacation

After a while strolling among the plants and the ruins, Shira found her happy place: the overlook.

Off the edge of the garden, the land gives way to a black lava coast, and the open Pacific throws itself against it.

"Relaxing" isn't quite the right word, and the photos are the proof. This is not trickling-creek, butterflies-on-the-breeze calm. The surf out there is violent — whole waves detonating against the rock and throwing spray into the air. The stillness it produces in you is a different kind: you go quiet because the thing in front of you is so powerful you can't look away. Transfixed, not soothed.

For Shira, this was the whole point — an actual moment of rest on a trip that I do my best to ensure has none. Or as we joked: she'd managed to find a bit of real vacation while on her vacation. Asked weeks later what stood out at Kahanu, it wasn't the breadfruit or the ruins — it was the overlook. That's the one that stayed with her.

Me, I enjoyed the overlook too — for about four minutes. There's a whole garden back there to explore, and you want me to stand at the edge of it and watch the water? I love that this kind of rest exists; it's just not my jam. My ideal vacation, I've come to admit, is the kind where — when it's over — you need a Shira vacation to recover.

For Me: A Garden of Tech

Because while Shira was finding peace, I kept noticing the same thing: technology.

Not the kind with wires and screens — technology in its older, wider sense: a deft answer to a hard problem. By that definition, a garden of working plants is one such answer after another — and two of them stuck with me. One clicked while I was still walking the grounds; the other didn't land until I sat down to write this. Both left me with the same thought: how clever.

The first is the Canoe Garden, and the sign at the entrance tells you the concept up front: every plant in here is one the Polynesians carried with them — loaded into voyaging canoes and sailed across open ocean to land no one had found yet. I walked the trail, stopping at each plaque, taking in what every plant had been brought for: food, medicine, cordage, containers, even the makings of ritual. Tallying it up at the end, I realized what I'd just walked through — not provisions for a journey, but a civilization starter kit. And it packed like one, too: not canoe-loads of soil and potted plants, but cuttings, shoots, and seed, wrapped in damp moss and tapa and hung in the canoe's shelter. How cool is that?

The idea stuck with me well past the garden gates. Weeks later, writing up our Day 2 hike, I was working back through my photos when I recognized one of these very canoe plants — one I'd shot on the trail without yet knowing what I had. It became a centerpiece of that post.

That was the first of the two. Here's the second.

The Largest Temple in Polynesia — And How We Know Its Name

In the middle of the garden sits Piʻilanihale Heiau: the largest ancient temple in all of Polynesia. A platform of dry-stacked basalt — no mortar, just fitted stone — rising in great terraced tiers some fifty feet high, its base furred over with jungle. It's an impressive sight. I admired it. I photographed it. I moved on.

It was only later, while researching this post, that I picked up a small, surprising fact: Hawaiian had no written form until the 1820s, when missionaries arrived and used English letters to set the language down on paper. So there are no old deeds here. No chronicles. Not a single word carved into the stones themselves. Which raises a genuine puzzle: how does anyone know the temple's name — Piʻilanihale — at all? Is it just a good guess?

The answer is oral tradition. I'd always half-assumed an oral tradition was a fallback, the thing you're stuck with until you invent writing. I couldn't have been more off-base. What the Hawaiians built was an engineered information system, and a formidable one:

It ran on trained specialists, not fuzzy collective memory. Composers (haku mele) and genealogists trained from childhood to carry long chants with precision. The chants were built for fidelity — fixed meter, rhyme, repetition — and I suspect that structure doubled as error-checking: fumble a line and the broken rhythm gives the slip away. And accuracy was enforced because the stakes were legal. Your genealogy was your rank and your claim to land, so rivals had every motive to check your every line. As for capacity: the Kumulipo, the great Hawaiian creation chant, runs to some two thousand lines and threads thousands of ancestors — and it was carried entirely in memory before anyone ever wrote it down.

That's not a primitive workaround. That's a memory technology.

All of this forced me to sit with a bias I hadn't known I was carrying. I'd always taken the written word to be the safe one and memory the fragile one — what I scribble in a notepad is surely more reliable than what I try to keep in my head. But the Hawaiian system wasn't really competing on those terms. It was built around a different property altogether: it was distributed. The knowledge didn't live in an object; it lived in people, many of them at once. And distributing it that way bought two things that usually pull against each other — it made the knowledge both hard to destroy and impossible to lock away.

It's hard to destroy. A written archive has a single point of failure: it can die in one fire — one library, one bad afternoon, gone. A chant copied across a thousand living minds has no library to burn; to erase it, you'd have to erase the people. Which, unthinkably, is nearly what happened. Introduced disease collapsed the Native Hawaiian population by something like ninety percent within a few generations, and scholars like Samuel Kamakau spent the 1800s writing frantically to catch the chants before their last carriers were gone. It took a catastrophe of that magnitude to threaten the very thing I'd lazily filed under fragile.

It's impossible to lock away. A scroll is a single scarce object — and how many scrolls were there, really? Powerful to whoever owns it, and invisible to everyone else. A chant has no such gate: every child who learns it carries the whole library out the door. The knowledge reaches the commoner, the kid, the far-off island — anyone with ears. Writing is a magnificent technology, but it quietly assumes you have the document. An oral tradition assumes only a person.

So how do we know its name? The chants carried it. Piʻilanihale — "house of Piʻilani" — names the same Piʻilani line whose King's Highway we'd walked the day before, the ancient road that ran right to this temple's gate. The name is threaded into the Kumulipo itself, carried in memory across centuries before anyone ever wrote it down. No inscription in the stone required — just the distributed system doing exactly what it was built to do.

The deeper I got into the Hawaiian system, the more I realized I'd built a lightweight version of it myself. For all my devotion to the notepad, there are a handful of lists I make a point of keeping in my head. Like the Hawaiian chants, they lean on structure to stay robust — in my case, each item is pinned to the next letter of the alphabet, so a gap in the sequence gives away anything I've dropped. Here's my hiking checklist, for one. And the reason I love them is the exact reason the chant beats the scroll: I can run one at the open trunk of the car, or at the trailhead, or half-asleep the night before a flight — no phone to unlock, no list to dig out. The library lives in me. The Hawaiians used the trick to carry a whole civilization across the ocean; I use it to stop forgetting the bug spray. Same technology — wildly different stakes.

Two Gifts

Same garden, same paths — and two completely different gifts. Shira got a moment of rest; I got a head full of ideas. The place rewarded us twice over — the best thing it could do for two people who travel as differently as we do.

The guidebook suggests the two-hour tour, if your schedule allows. Ours didn't — we squeezed in one rushed hour and the $36 entry. Worth every minute — and every penny.

Maui Adventure - Day 5: Fantastic Pho, Found Under Fluorescent Lights

[Composed 1/5/2026]

After a fun day of beaching, snorkeling and hiking, powered by Moon Cheese and Ritz Crackers, we were ready for a proper meal in a proper restaurant. As luck would have it, Huong Nam, a Vietnamese restaurant with solid veggie options, was a short detour from the route back to our hotel. Between the Yelp reviews and the menu on the website, it seemed like a perfect fit.

Then we pulled into the parking lot. Hmmm, this seemed familiar.

The address dropped us not at a restaurant but at the Maui Marketplace — a strip-mall — where we had hit up Old Navy on the first day. That was odd; we hadn't noticed a Vietnamese place here. But I'd been more focused on picking up some hiking pants than anything else. We kept driving until we realized there was no restaurant. The address corresponded to the mall's food court. Not a trendy food hall, or a bustling market. A basic food court. Was this a Panda Express situation? A counter wedged between a smoothie stall and a plate-lunch window? Our expectations, so high five minutes ago, fell in real time.

With no other great options, we went for it.

Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover

The pho was delicious and, of course, the portion generous. The fried rice was far less greasy than it often is around here, and the summer rolls were fresh and not an afterthought.

We sat at a long communal table painted in bold tropical colors, fluorescent food-court light overhead, and ate one of the best meals of the trip. Don't judge a book by its cover.

What We Learned After

When we got home from Maui, one question came up more than once: did you see any evidence of the Lahaina fires? Honestly — no. Aside from a few "Maui Strong" signs, the wildfires that destroyed Lahaina in 2023 never entered our field of view.

Except they did. We just didn't know it over dinner.

A little digging told the story. The Huong Nam we ate at is the continuation of a restaurant that, until August 8, 2023, sat at 658 Front Street — the Wharf Cinema Center, across from the famous banyan tree, on Lahaina's iconic oceanfront main drag. (Its old listing, under the previous name Pho Saigon 808, is now marked permanently closed.) That day, Front Street burned in the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century. The business now operates a few miles inland, from that Kahului food court.

I'll admit I went looking for a cinematic story. I pictured the owner, eyes welling, editing the address on the "Contact Us" page — down but not out, they were forced to change their coveted waterfront location to a humble food court. The facts are far less dramatic. There was never any faded grandeur to mourn: the old Front Street spot was a humble counter with great reviews, the same as the place we ate. And the website I imagined them tearfully updating? It's brand new — built for the food-court version, a step up from the auto-generated listing the Lahaina location had gotten by on. The restaurant didn't fall from grace. It was always exactly this: unpretentious and very good, whether on the water or under fluorescent lights.

The same Front Street waterfront, before and after. Click through to drag the slider yourself on the interactive Lahaina Wildfire Damage map.

I'd heard the Lahaina fire was a significant disaster. Seeing it is another thing entirely. In the before-and-after above, a green, lived-in town vanishes block by block into gray — utter devastation.

And that's the strange part: the fire never announced itself to us. It reached us anyway — not as a ruin we sought out, but as a good bowl of pho, eaten without a clue.

Eat Here

If you find yourself on Maui, go. The food is excellent, and you'll be putting your money into a local business that took a real hit and kept going.

But don't take my word for it — here's the receipt. Vegetarian pho, summer rolls with tofu, tofu fried rice. The evidence speaks for itself.

Maui Adventure - Day 5: Chasing a Brown Sign Hat Trick

[Composed 1/5/2026]

I have a weakness for brown signs. You know the ones — those little brown highway markers that flag a historic site, a scenic overlook, some monument you've never heard of. Sure, most just hand you a plaque and a "huh, cool." But once in a while, one scores: something unforgettable. Either way, I've never seen one I didn't want to follow.

This stretch of Maui's southern coast had three of them lined up at once: the old King's Highway, a monument to the first European to set foot on the island, and — the one I really wanted — a lighthouse at the island's dry southern tip. A brown sign hat trick.

I have a thing for lighthouses. A good one is an engineering marvel: the same brutal problem — keeping ships off the rocks — solved and re-solved for centuries, built to shrug off the worst the ocean can throw at it. I wasn't sure what this one had been built to weather, but I was eager to stand before it and size it up.

Getting there meant a drive to the literal end of the road: Makena Alanui Road runs south past La Pérouse Bay until the pavement gives up, and you park. From there, you'll find the trail head for the Hanomanioa Light Trail, which doubles as the approach to the Hoapili Trail — that old King's Highway — brown sign number two. The second half of the Light Trail overlaps the Hoapili Trail, so chasing a lighthouse comes with the privilege of setting foot on a royal road laid down five centuries ago (more on that below). The path is well-marked the whole way and hugs the shoreline, with open-ocean views at nearly every step. Spoiler: we never reached the lighthouse.

Terrain: the rocky road ahead

The footing is the first thing you notice. The trail starts over stark black lava rock, the path threading between the shoreline and the lava flow, with the occasional pocket beach breaking up the trail. It's raw and gorgeous and not remotely gentle — so pro tip: wear closed-toed, sturdy shoes. We wore trail runners and were perfectly happy. Oh, and don't forget the hat and sunscreen; the same overcast day that made our beach visit earlier in the day feel forced almost certainly saved us from heatstroke out on the black rock.

One of the first questions I had out there was: how old is this lava we're wandering over? Ten years? Ten thousand? You'd think, in the age of GPS satellites and carbon dating, we'd know. We don't — and there are three serious answers, none of which agree.

Ask Hawaiian oral tradition and you get one number: accounts collected in 1841 had people saying their grandparents watched this flow happen — which points to roughly A.D. 1750. Ask the European charts and you get another: the flow shows up somewhere between La Pérouse's 1786 survey and Vancouver's 1793 one, which is where the popular "1790" date comes from. Ask the laboratory — radiocarbon dating, calibrated, plus paleomagnetic work — and you get a third answer entirely: somewhere around A.D. 1480 to 1600, two or three centuries earlier than the signs claim.

What I love is that this isn't a "science versus myth" story. All three are real, careful attempts to answer the same question, and the USGS itself takes the oral history seriously, noting that it "is important and not to be overlooked among the numbers from laboratories." We were standing on the evidence of an obviously dramatic event, in the era of science, and the honest answer to "when did this happen?" is still: nobody's quite sure.

History: the village that was here

As you walk, you start seeing it. Lava rock carefully arranged. Is that a wall? The remnant of a house? Ooh, maybe a platform for religious ceremonies? Every time I saw this obvious order, I had the same question: what am I looking at? Alas, there's no placard, no sign, no QR code to scan. Nothing to tell you.

What's up with this? Are these not of archaeological value? Maybe it's just local teens goofing around, stacking stones. Or maybe it's some grand mystery: Babe, we just found Hawaii's Stonehenge. The signs told us this was a historic location — so maybe the rock structures themselves are the puzzle.

A bit of research put these theories to rest. There were no signs, but plenty of answers. This stretch of coast is Keoneʻōʻio, and the rocks aren't random. They're the stone bones of a Hawaiian settlement — house foundations, fishing shrines, salt pans. Even the clusters that puzzled me have a name: kauhale, the Hawaiian household, which wasn't a single building but several, each with its own purpose. One reason for the sprawl: under the ʻai kapu, men and women ate in separate houses — a husband cooked two ovens, one for his wife and then one for himself in the men's eating house. It's kashrut meets the mechitza, ancient Hawaiian style. A home was a compound, and a compound leaves a lot of walls.

And here's the kicker. The man whose monument waits at the end of this hike — La Pérouse — walked this exact shore in 1786 and found it alive. In his journal the huts ran "along the seashore," so many that "one might mistake an area of three or four leagues for a single village," the people paddling out to trade "pigs, sweet potatoes, bananas, [and] taro." So when did that thriving place empty into the silent rubble I was stepping over? Maddeningly, the question loops right back to the rock. If the lava is as old as the science says, these are very likely the remains of the very village La Pérouse described, raised on stone that had cooled centuries earlier. If you believe the "1790" on the signs, the story turns darker and murkier. I can't settle it — the same unanswerable when? that hangs over the lava hangs over the ruins. I never got my placard, but I got plenty of answers.

The trail itself is the headline artifact. This is a remnant of the Alaloa o Kihapiilani — the King's Highway — first built in the 16th century under Piʻilani, the chief who unified Maui's districts. In its day it ran clear around the island, reserved for the aliʻi — Hawaiʻi's ruling chiefs. In the 1820s, Governor Hoapili rebuilt sections of it for horses and carts, which is how it got the name everyone uses today. He did it with convict road gangs — many of them sentenced for adultery — which earned the project its nickname, the road that sin built. So you're walking a royal road, cut by a lava flow, rebuilt by a governor, and now reclaimed by the wind — layers of time stacked under your boots.

Wildlife: feral and wild, both hiding in plain sight

Two creatures stood out this trip. One is a story about people. The other is, no exaggeration, one of the toughest animals on the planet.

First, the goats. I had no idea they were coming — we rounded a stretch of trail and there they were, picking their way across the lava. My instinct was that they weren't wild — somebody's animals, surely, ranging out from a farm. I even gave them a job: aren't goats basically a low-tech lawnmowing service? Wrong.

They're neither pets nor wild natives. They're feral, and the backstory is colonial. Goats first came ashore with Captain Cook in 1778, with more added over the following decades. With no predators and a breeding cycle that runs to two sets of twins a year, they did what goats do — today feral goats rank among the most destructive introduced herbivores in the islands. The ones picking across the lava in front of us were, in all likelihood, descendants of those first shipboard arrivals. That's what stuck with me: not an invasive-species statistic so much as living history — the still-unspooling aftermath of a decision made on a deck in the 1700s.

And then there's the animal that caught my eye in the moment, yet has a story that goes far beyond what I imagined.

Down at the waterline, clamped to the rocks in the spot where the waves hit hardest, were dark, low, dome-shaped little creatures. I gave them a glance and a guess: limpets. I thought back to the survival TV shows where contestants harvest and eat these easy-to-collect shellfish. Turns out the eating part was right; the identification was way off.

It's not a limpet at all. It's a sea urchin — the helmet urchin, or hāʻukeʻuke (Colobocentrotus atratus). What looks like a smooth tiled dome is actually its spines, flattened and fused into armor plating. In my defense, when I think sea urchin, I think spiny critter on the sea floor, ready to pierce your foot with its medieval — yet effective — defense system. These take sea-urchining to a whole new level. Their superpower: this thing lives in the single most violent real estate on the whole shore, the wave-impact zone where almost nothing else can hold on. It resists being torn off at water speeds up to about 27.5 meters per second — a gale strong enough to uproot trees. A normal spiny urchin gets ripped away above 7.5. The trick is tube-foot adhesion roughly three times stronger than an ordinary urchin's, plus that dome shape, which takes the sideways shove of a wave and redirects it into a downward press. The harder the wave hits, the harder it clamps down.

Which brings us back to my limpet hunch. I was wrong about the animal and I missed the engineering entirely — but the one thing I guessed, that people surely ate these, was right. Per archaeologist Marshall Weisler's 25-year dig on west Molokaʻi — more than 185,000 urchin fragments, published in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology — hāʻukeʻuke wasn't a snack. It was a staple, supplying over 80% of the fat and nearly 40% of the protein of all the shellfish at those ancient sites. The roe was a delicacy rich in vitamins the taro-and-sweet-potato diet ran short on. The spines got faceted into abraders for the final smoothing of bone fishhooks. The shape really is practical.

A clever detail: Weisler could reconstruct the size of a harvested urchin from its mouthparts — its "Aristotle's lantern" — the way you might estimate a person's height from a single femur. Run that across the sites and a pattern falls out. The big ones were placed on shrines. The small ones ended up in the kitchen midden. Food, tool, and offering, all from the little black dome one could easily dismiss.

The gods say no

After crossing lava and beach, you finally arrive at the official Hoapili Trail - Trailhead. Here, the trees fade away and it truly is lava rock in every direction. Zoom out on Google Maps and you realize you're entering a mile-wide lava flow — its edge as clear today as it was in the 1700s, or the 1400s, or whenever the lava was last hot.

We were now a mere half mile from the lighthouse. We were home free — or so I thought. As we walked, storm clouds gathered in the west. Then some drizzle. Then rain. With zero cover, Shira wasn't having it — and I had to admit I didn't know what kind of storm was rolling in. Could we sprint the last quarter mile and snap a picture of Hanomanioa Light?

No, we decided. The prudent choice was to retreat. By the time we made it back to the Hoapili Trail head, the clouds had cleared and the weather was back to being perfect. Clearly, the gods wanted us to avoid Hanomanioa Light, and it was best to simply take the hint.

The less poetic version, which I only pieced together once I got home: this dry southern tip sits in Haleakalā's rain shadow, sheltered from the trade winds that soak the rest of Maui — which is exactly why the lava out here is desert. Serious weather does reach it, but rarely, and it comes from the opposite direction. Kona storms — kona is Hawaiian for leeward — are the winter lows that reverse the trades and park over the islands for days, pushing wind and rain in from the south and west and turning the island's calm corner genuinely mean.

We caught nothing of the sort. What turned us back was a squall — a few minutes of rain that blew through and cleared. But those clouds stacking up in the West, they certainly seemed to mean business.

The man who said no

Before jumping in the car and leaving the area, take the short walk from the parking lot to the La Pérouse Monument.

Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, was the first European known to set foot on Maui, in May 1786, at Keoneʻōʻio — the bay that now bears his name. And here's why he's worth the stop. Explorers of La Pérouse's era had a reputation for treating found lands as discovered ones — something to be claimed. Today we recognize that practice as cruel and deeply misguided. The surprising part: so did La Pérouse. He explicitly refused to claim Maui for France. He wrote:

"This European practice is too utterly ridiculous, and philosophers must reflect with some sadness that, because one has muskets and cannons, one looks upon 60,000 inhabitants as worth nothing, ignoring their rights over a land where for centuries their ancestors have been buried…"

Standing on a trail where the past keeps refusing to resolve into a tidy answer, it's a good note to end on: exploration didn't have to mean exploitation. One man, at the right moment, knew exactly what he was looking at — and chose to leave it alone. (More on him at Images of Old Hawaiʻi and the La Pérouse Headland memorial page.)

For those keeping track, I came up one brown sign short. We never did reach the lighthouse. But as I was on a run, mentally editing this blog post, it finally clicked. The thing I drive out to lighthouses for — an engineering marvel built to take the ocean's hardest blow and hold — I'd been crouched right over it on the rocks, guessing it was a limpet. The helmet urchin was my lighthouse. I just hadn't realized it at the time.

Tally it up: the King's Highway under my boots, the monument to the man who said no, and an engineering marvel to rival the one I'd driven out for. Two of three brown signs in hand, and nature quietly supplying the third. Hat trick confirmed.

For the data-minded, here's the full Garmin track — distance, pace, and elevation: