beautiful day! 79 degrees and sunny. We could see Lahaina and the nearby islands of Lania and Molokai.We were really excited. Our excitement was tempered somewhat by the the arrangements that the Zaandam makes for tendering (putting people on lifeboats and taking them ashore when there are not ports deep enough for the cruise ship to use). It was not first-come first-serve. It was whoever paid big bucks for shore excursions goes first and everyone goes whenever they get around to it. F
or two people who pride themselves at being Team #1 off the ship in every port, we were not happy. If we knew what we learned at the next tendering we really would have been steaming. The tendering honchos do not fill up the tenders!! They load up one tour group then another, etc. until all the tour groups have been sent ashore. It was 10 am before we were tendered in Lahaina. The thing is that there are plenty of seats on the tenders taking the tour groups in. In the next port when they called for the first tour group we went on down and got on without telling the tendering honchos.Lahaina is essentially a tourist trap. Souvenir shops, restaurants, and various tour operators line the main streets. It is nice in the downtown area and it is easy to walk to everything in the town. Most of the commercial activity is located on Front Street which is one block from the dock where the tender drops its passengers. Just a short walk up Hotel Street by Banyan Park will get you to Front Street. That will take you in the front entrance of a nice little shopping area. I bought what I first thought was a simple original watercolor of some flowers in one of the shops there. A guy was sitting at a table working on these. I watched while he painted in the colors on one. What he was actually doing was painting a drawing that had been reproduced on a copier. On the back of the ones he had for sale (3 for $5) he did a full disclosure about how they were produced. It was pretty so I bought it irregardless of the mass-production aspect of it.
Wharf Street is lined with tour operators selling fishing, snorkeling, and whale watching tours. It looked like a busy place. Most of the ship's tours originated from this area I think.
The little shopping area houses the bus terminal. The bus system on Maui is very good. We were going to catch a bus 15 miles down H
ighway 30 to Ma'alaea (Pronounced MA-A-LIE-A) where we were going to go on a whale watching excursion on a sloop-rigged catamaran. Ma'alaea is a oceanside village that is centered around Ma'alaea Harbor Shops shopping center. This shopping center is was next to the Maui Ocean Center. We didn't tour the Maui Ocean Center because it seemed kinda of pricey ($21-$24) without that much to offer veteran aquarium goes like ourselves and we didn't have much time. We took a quick look around the shopping center and decided to hop the bus again to go over to Kahului to look around. Only about 8 miles away, on the other side of Maui.We didn't have much time to really explore Kahului thanks to the incompetent tendering operation on the ship, so all we did was look around a shopping center where the bus station was. It was interesting to see the differences in product selection in Hawaii versus Arizona. We checked out a few of the local stores including one nice fabric shop called Sew Special where Seven got some more quilting fabric and I bought her a neat pineapple quilt pattern.
We got on the bus back to Ma'alaea to get to our whale watch adventure.
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