Posted 10:29 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Beach Break

It's hot. Are you hot? I'm hot. Let's go to the beach:


Kepuhi Beach, Molokai, Jan. 2002
This beach is on the west side of Molokai (in Hawaii, for those who came in late). It's not one of your carefree, laze-about-and-bake beaches. This is a serious, moody beach, thinking deep thoughts as it stares off in the direction of Oahu, full of amused contempt for the happy tourist-filled beaches there, and never, ever jealous.

I like it a lot.

I have about a dozen shots of this scene, taken while I was waiting for the sun to come out. It never did, really. Before the sun set I managed to get this shot, where most of the landscape is lit.

Here's a swell photo from a German tourist site, taken from the other end of the beach. If you google around a bit, you find photos suggesting that there's a tourist-friendly sandy beach over yonder, but I cannot confirm this.

The day we were there it was very windy, as you can see -- not very amenable to lazing. There was some sort of resort there, comprised of dozens of nice little buildings. It was completely deserted. Niles remembers reading that people were thinking of running a commuter ferry between Oahu and Molokai, and there was housing built in anticipation of that. But then they decided (wisely, I think) that the sea was too rough too often to reliably run a ferry.

Molokai is beautiful, but it's not what you'd call jam-packed with attractions. It has two towns: Kaunakakai and Maunaloa. I seem to remember that Kaunakakai was the main town but Maunaloa was newer; it was filled with people who worked for some corporation, probably involving sugar. It had a Pizza Hut, or maybe it was a KFC, or possibly one of those creepy hybrids. Then there's the leper colony on the Kalaupapa peninsula in the north, and Hawala Bay (a nice beach) on the east side. If you don't mind roughing it you can hike the beautiful mountains north of it. After that, though, Molokai is pretty much a spent force.

If you go to Molokai, consider taking the turboprop. Jets can't land when the winds are high. We lost a day off our trip because of that.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii