[Composed 1/6/2026]
The Road to Hāna is Maui's most famous drive — cliffs, one-lane bridges, a waterfall around every bend — and from our base out on West Maui, we set off to see what all the fuss was about. Let's drive!
6:06 am · Mile 0 · 📍 map
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Still in the hotel parking garage, and our roles are already set: Shira at the wheel, making forward progress, and me riding shotgun with our guidebook — Frommer's Hawaiʻi — open on my lap, hunting for reasons to stop.
6:29 am · Mile 17 · 📍 map
Rolling before sunup. That's not us being heroic — it's the guidebook's recipe for doing Hāna in a day: leave just before sunrise so you cover the easy opening miles in the dark and hit the real road as the light comes up. The price is missing the hotel's gourmet breakfast; peanut butter on a tortilla by headlight it is.
6:45 am · Mile 26 · 📍 map
The first official Hāna Highway sign — we're pointed the right way! Don't be fooled, though: it's another 15 miles before this ordinary road becomes the Road to Hāna everyone means.
7:08 am · Mile 41 · 📍 map
A preview of coming attractions. I've been nervous about this adventure since long before we got in the car. The Road to Hāna has a reputation — cliffs, hairpin turns, one-lane bridges — and I don't love heights. From the first time I heard of it, some part of me was shopping for reasons to skip it. Now here we are, and I'm eyeing the GPS, waiting to find out how much of that reputation is earned.
7:09 am · Mile 41 · 📍 map
Mile Marker 0 — we've arrived! Only took 41 miles to get to mile zero. From here the markers count the historic road: the stretch that, as the guidebook tells it, was cut in 1926 by "pickax-wielding convicts" carving a shelf out of the cliff's edge.
7:29 am · Mile 44 · 📍 map
Twin Falls — the guidebook's first stop, and somehow both the least and most rewarding stop of our day. Least rewarding because it was a letdown: pay-to-park, the rain turned it into a muddy mess, and it broke our momentum. In the moment, it felt like a tourist trap. Most rewarding because of who we ran into: a couple from Texas, comparing notes as to how we'd arrived here. They'd driven the entire loop the day before, skipped Twin Falls, and doubled back to see what they'd missed. Wait — the whole loop? I was intrigued. I quizzed them about the details, and as we left Twin Falls a seed had been planted.
8:01 am · Mile 46 · 📍 map
One of our first single-lane bridges. And if this is what I'd been dreading, I figured, we've got this. Slow down, respect the yield sign, then slow down some more — a couple of bridges in, I'd relaxed. Of course, the bridges were only one piece of the reputation.
8:12 am · Mile 49 · 📍 map
TRUCK! OK, maybe I relaxed too soon. A car coming the other way is a polite negotiation; a full-size truck is a different math problem. The same strategy holds — slow way down and wait your turn.
8:17 am · Mile 50 · 📍 map
Check out these views! With the bridges conquered, my other worry was the hairpin turns and sheer drop-offs. Fifty miles in there had been plenty of wild turns, but thankfully no sheer drop-offs. It should be noted that Shira, not once in planning or executing this adventure, had any concerns about the drive. After years at the wheel for sketchy drives, it takes a lot more than a few one-lane bridges to faze her.
8:39 am · Mile 54 · 📍 map
The overlook at Kaumahina State Wayside. Nice views. Nice bathroom. Nice bird. Just nice.
9:03 am · Mile 56 · 📍 map
The black-sand beach at Honomanu Bay. Nothing to pay and hardly a soul around — a few local surfers doing their thing, one other set of visitors, and otherwise the cove was ours. Just black sand and surf. There's also a small shrine tucked in here — a living one, it turns out — but that's a story of its own, coming soon.
9:49 am · Mile 63 · 📍 map
A pretty typical view from a one-lane bridge: lush green and a picture-perfect jungle stream. And "typical" is the marvel of this road — it's just what's out the window the whole way. You don't have to hunt for the beauty here; it finds you.
10:10 am · Mile 65 · 📍 map
The perfect waterfall at Puaʻa Kaʻa. It had been raining in bursts all morning — one of the little things nagging at an otherwise glorious day. Then it clicked: the rain wasn't marring anything. It was powering some of the best parts. These falls don't run this full and this gorgeous without it.
10:21 am · Mile 66 · 📍 map
A mile on, another beauty: Hanawī Falls. Proof it would have been safe to skip Twin Falls: this is the very thing they were charging for, running free and gorgeous a few feet from the car.
10:29 am · Mile 67 · 📍 map
You'd think a truck like this filling the frame would be a high-pressure moment. Shira played it cool the whole time — never once rattled. She just waited her turn and kept on truck'n.
10:33 am · Mile 69 · 📍 map
Coconut Glen's! Genuinely tasty coconut ice cream. My one gripe: the eco-friendly coconut-shell bowl actually cost more than the throwaway cup. C'mon, man — your whole brand is coconuts. How are the shells the upsell?
11:23 am · Mile 71 · 📍 map
Our first major stop of the day: Kahanu Garden — "the garden with no flowers." That one earned a post all its own. Read it
12:42 pm · Mile 74 · 📍 map
Our second major stop of the day, on a timed reservation: Waiʻānapanapa State Park — the black-sand beach, a coastal hike, a gecko, a mongoose. Also its own post. Read it
3:16 pm · Mile 77 · 📍 map
And we're in Hāna! And to my own surprise, I have almost no pictures of the town. Is it because Hāna really is that tiny? Because I was so drained from the amazing journey so far? Because we still had one essential — and possibly stressful — question ahead: do the entire loop, or turn back? I honestly can't say. What I can say is this: the guidebook warns about the visitors who blow into Hāna and wonder what all the fuss is about — and with barely a photo, I feared that might be us.
3:34 pm · Mile 77 · 📍 map
A fantastic Thai dinner from a food truck in Hāna — and the answer to that fear: proof we'd made at least one real connection with the place. Vietnamese in a food court, now Thai from a food truck — Hawaii keeps serving up excellent meals in the most unexpected places.
4:11 pm · Mile 83 · 📍 map
Maybe it was the small gamble on the Thai food truck telling me to go all in — or maybe it was the seed that Texas couple planted back at Twin Falls, finally sprouting. Either way, I was now fully convinced: we should do the full loop. My yes was my completist nature cheering the decision on; Shira's was more the yes of someone planning to prove it a bad idea.
4:17 pm · Mile 84 · 📍 map
Wailua Falls — right off the road, and oh so pretty. And there's that crew of young folks again, goofing off — we'd leapfrogged this same friendly bunch a couple of times on the back half. Oh, it must be magical to do this road in your twenties, without a care in the world.
4:39 pm · Mile 88 · 📍 map
The small churchyard where Charles Lindbergh is buried. There's a lot more to this quiet spot than one grave — that's a post of its own, coming soon.
4:54 pm · Mile 90 · 📍 map
The guidebook flatly notes that rental-car companies warn you off this road — and right here, we got our first glimpse of why. What got to me was the not-knowing: does the road get rougher from here? And if it does — then what? With maybe an hour of daylight left, the odds of clearing the sketchy stretch before dark were slipping, and getting stranded out here after nightfall — exactly what everyone warns against — had gone from unlikely to uncomfortably plausible. The lone upside if it came to that: Shira would get to be right.
5:17 pm · Mile 96 · 📍 map
The road serves up a run of surprises. One: the dirt gives way to pristine, freshly-laid pavement — honestly the nicest we'd driven all day. Two: there's a catch — it's a single lane threaded with blind crests, and you come over each one with no idea what's barreling the other way. Three: this, it turns out — not the cliffs or the bridges I'd braced for all day — is the scariest driving of the whole trip. Four: look around — the jungle is falling away, and a whole new landscape is opening up.
5:24 pm · Mile 99 · 📍 map
It's like we've crossed onto a whole new side of Maui — and, actually, we had. Wide-open hills, sweeping golden vistas: I hadn't expected any of it, and it turned out to be one of the trip's real gems. We'd rounded the back of the island, out of the wet, windward jungle and onto Haleakalā's dry, leeward flank.
5:55 pm · Mile 106 · 📍 map
As the sun set, the road opened back up to two full lanes — right on schedule. Out before sunrise, home after sunset: exactly the plan, and amazingly, we'd hit it almost to the minute.
6:50 pm · Mile 137 · 📍 map
The back half of the loop is complete, and near Kahului we rejoin the Hāna Highway — the same sign we flagged this morning back at Mile 26 — for the final stretch home. We can't help but reflect on how much went right today: the "bumper-to-bumper rental-car parade" the guidebook warned of never showed, the rain turned out to be a gift, and our timing fell right into place.
7:32 pm · Mile 164 · 📍 map
Made it! Amazing driving, Babe!
Doing Hāna in a day can go wrong in a dozen ways, but between our planning, my insatiable curiosity, Shira's driving and her careful watch on the clock, and a healthy dose of good luck, we'd nailed it.
Two more stories from this drive are still to come — stay tuned.
The route
The full loop — about 164 driving miles, from West Maui out to Hāna and back around the dry south side of the island.
