Maui’s oldest hiking company has a top-notch reputation. It offers six choices, including a short half-day trip to a waterfall where you can swing like Tarzan or cannonball into a pool fed by waterfalls. It’s only a 1-mile hike. A longer hike is a day on Haleakala with two 2-mile hikes, one at the 8,000-foot elevation and one at the...

Kapahu Living Farm has a mission, to share the importance and meaning of taro, or kalo as it’s sometimes known. It was the bread of life for the ancient Hawaiians. They brought the plants with them from Polynesia on the earliest journeys to the Hawaiian Islands. Kapahu Living Farm is a project aimed at raising taro much in the way...

Kayaking on Maui seems like an understated activity compared to the more poplar stand-up paddle boarding and surfing. Hawaiians who take to small watercraft often choose outrigger canoes. Most often you’ll see a solitary kayaker, moving parallel to the beach with the steady rhythm of paddles, dip, dip, dip. Many of the beach kiosks in West Maui, including Kapalua Bay...

Wetlands once rimmed the Hawaiian Islands, though today little of this land is left. Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge is being restored to its natural marshy environment, which once covered this part of Central Maui. It consists of two areas of ponds straddling the roads between Kihei and West Maui and Ma‘alaea Harbor along the shore north of Kihei on...

You won’t find a gift shop, restrooms or a picnic table at Keanae Arboretum, but you will have the chance to walk through the nearly impenetrable subtropical forest on the Road to Hana. A well-developed path leads through a grove of non-native  trees and plants, which are labeled, and then to a section of Hawaiian plants. A taro patch highlights...

Maui Dive Shop is the go-to place (or maybe places for there are several locations) for anything you need for underwater activity. When you go into any of them to sign up for a trip, it’s easy to get distracted at the colorful racks of aloha shirts, boogie boards or rash guards. You find this array in Kihei., Wailea (Shops...

Maui Ocean Center tops the list for an activity away from the beach. Its name even pops up as the best attraction in Hawai‘i. It brings the world of underwater Maui to everyone. Visitors stroll spellbound through a 54-foot clear acrylic tunnel set in a 750,000-gallon aquarium replicating the open ocean. Overhead, graceful stingrays undulate in lazy motion. Sharks, sometimes...

The tasting at ONO Organic Farms morfs into a tropical feast right out of the Garden of Eden. A Boerner family member will likely greet you behind a table laden with jackfruit, lilikoi, guava, starfruit, soursop, ice cream bananas, sapote and half a dozen varieties of mango. The display looks like an over-the-top Gauguin still life. You’ll learn about raising...