Bang, Bang on Your Drum Baby.

Sunday

The plan was to meet our friend Teresa for an early morning hike around Napoli. Unfortunately, she was feeling a bit under the weather and decided to sleep in a bit. After our new favorite morning ritual of whale watching and tea drinking, we walked down to the main drag of Lahania, past the elementary school and the old banyan tree to the marina. There just are not many harbors in Hawaii and the ones that do exist tend to be man made and small with crumbling facilities. It's too bad, because I think it would be an interesting place to sail. The town of Lahania is interesting for a quick stroll. If you can look past all of the tourist shops you can find some interesting old buildings, churches, and cemeteries scattered about.
After the stroll we picked up Teresa and headed up to Napoli beach. This beach is situated within some low lying hotels, so it is not as hemmed in as some of the beaches with twenty story hotels towering over them. My goal was to check out the snorkeling which I succeeded in. The surf was up on the south side of the beach, so it was a bit cloudy. The coral was pretty dead and was completely encrusted with sea urchins. According to my marine biologist friend who spent quite a bit of time out here, the reefs are in pretty bad shape and are continuing to deteriorate. But they still have a bit of life left in them. We did get see a cool turtle swimming in the breakers.

Next it was off to the Hula grill for some lunch. This is a great seaside restaurant with really good food and great people watching. Highly recommended.
Afternoons are meant for lazing about and we had some power lazing to do before we headed south for the evening.
Maui has a ton of beaches and one of the biggest is Makena beach. This beach, also known as big beach, extends in a long swept crescent for who knows how long (well somebody does, but I can't remember). But that wasn't really our destination. We were heading to little beach, the beach for more of the free spirited types on the island. Every sunday, many of the locals gather, bringing drums, torches and not much else and have a downright pagan drum circle. This goes on from about 4 to well after sunset. I mean these guys drum continuously for hours. What a workout. As it gets darker, the fire dancing starts, complete with fiery swirling batons. This beach is the "alternative lifestyle" beach so you get quite the show. You have the buff tanned dude who spends hours running the length of the beach (all 100 yards of it) in his birthday suite while some other less buffed dude feels the need to roll around in the surf for the same amount of time. Reminded me of the courtship rituals of the birds of paradise. The sunset was pretty amazing and the walk out was particularly challenging since we left out flashlights in the hotel.