The Rough Guide to Maui (Miniguides) Book

INTRODUCTION Thanks to its superb beaches, ravishing tropical scenery, wide range of activities, and magnificent hotels, the island of Maui can justly claim to be the world?s most glamorous vacation destination. The slogan Maui No Ka ?Oi ? "Maui is the Best" ? may gloss over the fact that it?s both the second largest and the second youngest of the Hawaiian chain, and ranks a distant second to Oahu in terms of annual visitors, but for island inhabitants and devotees alike the "Valley Isle" has a cachet its neighbors could never match. All the Hawaiian islands are the summits of a chain of submarine volcanoes, poking from the Pacific more than two thousand miles off the west coast of America. Each has continued to grow for as long as it remained poised above a stationary "hot spot" in the earth?s crust; since Maui in its turn drifted to the northwest and lost its steady supply of fresh lava, it has begun to erode back beneath the ocean. Maui is what?s known as a "volcanic doublet", consisting of two originally separate but now overlapping volcanoes. The older of the two, known to geologists as Mauna Kahalawai, has eroded to become a serrated ridge that?s usually referred to as the West Maui Mountains; it?s now dwarfed by the younger Haleakala to the southeast. Although Haleakala is not technically extinct, but only dormant, and may erupt again at some point in the future, the hot spot now lies beneath the southern shores of the Big Island. As a result, Haleakala is not what it was: around 400,000 years ago, it stood several thousand feet taller, and dominated the landmass of Maui Nui, which also took in what are now the distinct islands of Kahoolawe, Molokai and Lanai. The channels between the four neighbors are the shallowest, and the calmest, in the state of Hawaii. Thanks to massive immigration, the population of modern Hawaii is among the most ethnically diverse in the world. Only perhaps 2 percent of Maui?s 120,000 inhabitants are pure Hawaiians, while another 20 percent claim at least some Hawaiian blood. The rest of the population includes the 26 percent who identify themselves as Caucasian, 16 percent Japanese, and 15 percent Filipino, though as over half of all marriages are classified as inter-racial such statistics are increasingly meaningless. Almost everyone speaks English, and as a rule the Hawaiian language is only encountered in the few words ? such as aloha or "love", the all-purpose island greeting ? that have passed into general local usage. For each of its permanent citizens, Maui welcomes around twenty tourists per year ? the annual total is around 2.35 million, each of whom stays on average for 6.7 days and spends at a rate of $171 per day. The island attracts a younger, more dynamic crowd than Waikiki, principally because it offers Hawaii?s most exhilarating range of vacation activities, including windsurfing, diving, sailing, snorkeling, cycling, hiking and horse-riding.Read More