Monday 10th September 2001, Maui HI
We checked out of the room and were back at the airport by 10.30am. Now all we needed to do was to book ourselves a flight to Maui. Aloha run half-hourly flights, and there was room on the next one. By lunchtime we were in Kahului.
The taxi dropped us at the Kihei Bay Surf ‘hotel’ (booked by Brigid over the Internet). The manager had taken the day off, and the caretaker had no record of our arrival. But the Kihei Bay Surf was no ordinary tourist hotel. It was a complex of slightly seedy-looking condos, mostly occupied by long-term residents. It became clear that even if there had been an available apartment, we did not relish the idea of staying there. (One small problem was that, having had confirmation of the booking by e-mail, we had arranged for a couple of items of mail to be forwarded to us there.) The caretaker helpfully directed us to another hotel, half a mile up the road. Grumbling, we donned our backpacks and tramped up the road to the far more appealing Maui Lu Resort.
No sooner had we deposited our baggage, than Kihei Rent-a-Car collected us, and whisked us over to their office in downtown Kihei, to pick up our slightly tired-looking (but very cheap) Nissan!
Our next stop was the Post Office to tell them of our change of lodgings. No problem. They would simply ask the postman to bring the letters back if he spotted them. While we were there, we posted the usual wad of postcards and ‘excess baggage’ back to the UK. We had missed Monday’s collection, so the mail wouldn’t get away until the following day.
Back at the hotel, we asked the reception staff for a recommendation for dinner. “Jock’s Beach Café is supposed to be good”, they said “but we have never been. Perhaps you could bring us back a sample menu”. And so it came to pass that, dressed elegantly in t-shirts and shorts, and sand in our shoes, we wandered into the swanky “Jacques on the Beach”. Doh! (To their great credit, the staff of Jacques couldn’t have minded less about our attire. )
Walking back to the hotel along the dark main road, John cautioned Brigid to stay to the left, out of the way of the on-coming traffic. Suddenly there was a squawk, followed by much wailing and gnashing of teeth … The edge of the road had dipped away unexpectedly, and Brigid had stumbled onto the rough tarmac. Ouch! There was a deep gash in her right knee, and her lower leg was badly scraped and bleeding. It looked as though scuba diving would be out of the question this week.