Early Afternoon In Kahului, Maui, Hawaii, October '08, artistic view, click to enlarge.
Aloha.
A Hawaii Superferry has been in operation for a while after many previous delays. Now things are pretty smooth, and you can enjoy trips between Oahu and Maui several times per week. It is always a good idea to reserve seats ahead of time. From Honolulu to Kahului, the departure time was around 6:00am the day we chose to travel to Maui. This means waking up in your hotel around 3:30am in the morning, after going to bed around 1:00am, you see why buying tickets ahead of time is a good idea. Whether to take your car with you is a decision you have to make, we will give you some hints. For about $10/day you can leave your car at the Pier, and not to worry about it. The downside is that now you have no car to drive in Maui and have to rent it, again preferably ahead of time. Inside the Superferry, there was plenty of room to seat the day we traveled; only about half of seats were occupied. Be prepared for a very cold inside, so a thick jacket is mandatory. The low temperature is supposed to keep people away from getting seasick. You are going to read a lot about that with plenty of remedies how to deal with it. I could count no more than four people being affected by it. It is a very unpleasant feeling, especially bad if you happened to have a good breakfast, since now the breakfast tends to come out! Our advice to deal with that problem, is to simply skip the morning breakfast and have only few sips of water. There is plenty of food to buy on the Superferry, this may not be the best of ideas, and it is up to you to decide. The Pacific Ocean between islands can be very rough, so the seasickness is one of the possible outcomes, another one is that the cars on the Superferry can move and get damaged. The are reports of this indeed happening. We told you to leave your car at the Pier, didn’t we? The Superfurry does not travel very fast, we are talking over three hour travel time, something closer to two hours would be more tolerable. The rough Pacific Ocean does not allow for that, at least for now. Apparently, a new model is being built and tested, hopefully a faster one.
If you forgot about something thick to wear, you will be coughing after the trip, but that is the only downside we can think of. During the trip, it is mostly water outside the windows, so watch a movie or two played on many big screens. If you happen to sit closer to windows, need to figure out which one, you can watch both Molokai and Maui provided you travel during the day, at night only some island lights are visible.
When you arrive, you are going to be hit with 80+F temperature, a very nice surprise after sitting inside in cold for over three hours.
In summary: (1) skip morning breakfast, or don’t eat much about four hours before the departure time in the afternoon or evening, (2) leave your car at the Pier, (3) sit in the center of the large room toward its back, (4) skip all food during the travel, (5) definitely have something warm with you.
With those points in mind, you can enjoy two beautiful Hawaiian Islands, and in the near future additional islands as well. Only pleasant things remain in our memories.
Mahalo everyone.
Follow us on twitter:
twitter.com/Vatsek .
YouTube videos:
youtube.com/Vatsek .
Flickr photos:
flickr.com/photos/25951201@N07/ .
