The Hana Highway

Zach and I have taken quite a few scenic drives within the last couple of years, and I'm happy to report back to the blogosphere that the Hana highway is one of the most beautiful drives we've been on to date (subtle hint to friends and family to start saving your dollar bills for plane tickets :). The legendary road to Hana is a 63 mile loop consisting of one-lane bridges, hairpin turns and is filled with island eye-candy. I felt like we were driving through a movie set with lush rainforests, rushing waterfalls, and some pretty crazy trees and plants. "What the shit? Is this real?" ran through my head more than once that day.

The highway has pull offs every mile or two that offer hiking, swimming in pools and waterfalls and scenic overlooks. I gripped my camera in the passenger seat barking that we needed to stop at like, every single one of them but luckily my driver thinks ahead and new that we would never get to our campsite by dark if we stopped at every. single. pull-off. So we saved some stops for next time and even managed to sneak in a stop at Hana Farm's farm-to-table pizza stand to eat a delicious pie.

With full bellies we rushed to set up camp as the last light of the day crept behind the horizon. When the morning came we groggily made our way out of the tent to watch the sun rise over the Paciic. It was so quiet and kinda magical.

We hiked the Pipiwai trail in the afternoon and were welcomed into a charming bamboo forest and greeted by a 400 foot waterfall at the end.

The back half of the highway starts as rainforest, changes to high desert, and then goes back to rainforest again. I think a weather geek would be giddy on this whole stretch of the highway.

We had a blast and are excited to explore more areas next time!

** Photography peeps - all of these images were shot with the 50mm 1.4 lens and Canon 5d classic.