Day Twelve January 17

Maui, known also as "The Valley Isle", is the second largest Hawaiian island. The island has world famous beaches and the sacred Iao Valley. The opportunity also exists to see humpbacks which use the Hawaiian Islands as a breeding ground before migrating back to the Northern areas of British Columbia and Alaska.

Our non ship Viator tour took us to the Maui Gold Pinapple plantation. A fun fact is that the pineapple takes two years to grow before it is cultivated. The rich soil on this Island provides excellent growing conditions. As well, because there are no hummings birds that suck the nectar out of the pineapples, the pineapples in this area are exceptionally sweet compared to the Dole plantation for example.

We often book tours through Tours By Local and Viator as we have been on this trip. They are generally much cheaper than the ship tours and and are usually a much smaller and intimate group. Tours by Local are exclusively private while Viator are with a small group. Most of the tours on this trip so far have been booked with Viator and they have all been excellent so we will continue using them as long as we can ensure that we can make it back in time before the ship departure. By the way, the ship never waits for you so if you miss it you have to figure out on your own how to meet it at the next port. An adventure that we hope will ever happen but it can when we change times daily. So our watches always have to be on ship time.