Sunday found us avoiding the resorts which tried to attract crowds with their "fabulous" Sunday brunches and extraordinary prices (48 dollars a head for a champagne brunch...not today...don't want to snooze the day away). We found the Kihei Cafe which brags of the best breakfast in Maui...who voted on this, we're not sure. But it was fun ordering at a counter then going to find an outdoor table amongst the neighboring rooster and hens that walked freely around the grounds. A sign was posted: "For health reasons, do not feed the birds." Yeh, ok. Are they providing the eggs served??" ;)

It was overcast Sunday and we took a chance at going to the Iao Valley, one of the fascinating features in the West Maui Mountains. This was a sacred place for the ancient Hawaiians through the time of the takeover by Kamehameha in 1795. The major attraction here is a volcanic prominence called the Iao (pronounced "eeow") Needle pictured here. In a matter of minutes, the clouds rolled in, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees, and rain started to fall. It was too cold and wet to hang around. This part of the island is a tropical rainforest and gets about 360 inches of rain a year!

Leaving the Iao Valley, we drove east about TWO miles. The rain stopped because we were now in the arid central plains. The rainfall here is about 10 inches per year. Weird, eh? Welcome to Maui! The dry plains are where a couple of western, risk-taking entrepreneurs bought up the "unusable" land (about 37,000 acres) from the native Hawaiians over several years. Samuel Alexander and Henry Baldwin of Alexander & Baldwin (founded in 1870) HC&S- HISTORY built irrigation ditches, tunnels, and piping to bring water from West Maui Mountains. The land was turned into the perfect environment to grow sugar cane: warm weather, moist soil, and constant sunshine. Sugar cane grows to anywhere from 8 to 30 feet tall and takes two years to mature. The fields are planted at different times so there is always a harvest going on. When the cane reaches maturity, irrigation is cut off. The plants wither and become dry except for the stalks which retain their moisture. When the leaves are dry and brown, the field is set on fire to get rid of the parts of the plants which are not used. The moist stalks do not burn, because of their water content, and they are harvested. Sugar was Hawaii's number one industry into the 1960's at which time tourism took over that honor.

So, after all that talk about rain and dark clouds and history and stuff, here's a picture to bring you back to why tourism is so popular in Maui...