We left our AirBnB in Haiku around 9:20am, giving us just enough time to make it to the farm tour at Maui Plumeria Gardens near the airport.
We were greeted by the owner, Doug Brunner, who has more than 400 plumeria trees on his property.
Doug gave each group a five-gallon bucket to carry with us, and then we strolled around the entire farm; Doug named each of the varieties of plumeria he was growing, told us the story behind some of them, and encouraged us to pick as many flowers as we wanted to take home. Some families filled their buckets – we were more restrained.
He also gave us some seeds and instructions for getting them through Agriculture Inspection at the airport and how to plant them when we get home.
I couldn’t keep up with the stream of the names of the varietals, but I did manage to photograph most of the them. Here are a few of my favorites.
It was a very interesting, aromatic, and colorful tour – if you’re on Maui, I highly recommend it.
There was one catch, though…Doug told us not to leave the bucket of plumeria in a hot car, so we (msotly Diane) had to schlep the bucket with us everywhere we went.
Our first stop after the gardens was the Maui Tropical Plantation, just down the road. It reminded me a lot of the late lamented Nut Tree outside Sacramento, complete with restaurants, historical exhibits, lots of shops, and nice landscaping. Unlike the Nut Tree, the plantation didn’t have an airport, but it did have a zipline. We had a pleasant lunch in their restaurant, Cafe O’Lei, and escaped the gift shops and farm store without buying anything.
We drove down to Kihei after lunch to go to the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary Visitor Center. We’d driven past there on several past trips to Maui, but never while the Visitor Center was actually open (9-3, Monday-Friday), though they do have a number of outdoor exhibits that we’d been able to see. We had a nice conversation with the volunteer staffing the center; he suggested we go outside to look for honu (turtles) on the beach. I didn’t see any on the beach, but I think I saw some underwater a few yards offshore.
We had our first Maui shave ice of the year at Peace Love Shave Ice; then it was time to head for our home for the next seven nights, the Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort Villas North.
Yes, the plumeria survived the trip!