faithful readers will recall that i recently booked a deeply discounted ticket to maui in order to celebrate quitting my job and to aid the humanitarian wildfire recovery efforts by stimulating the local economy (spending money there). maui was the favored vacation destination of my mom when i was a kid, but we'd always go to the same resort areas and do the same things (mostly hang out on the beach). my basic plan was to do the inverse of those trips: go deep into the less-resorty areas in the interior and along the remote back side of the island, do lots of hiking, eat at very local restaurants, and spend as little money as i could (sorry, local economy).
a big portion of the plan relied on camping (being the inverse of resort accomodations in many ways), which i assumed for some reason would be plentiful on the island. nope! there's only like 6 campgrounds on the island: 2 far backcountry ones for backpackers which i simply was not about, 1 that is inaccessible unless you have a 4x4 jeep and the skills to use it, 1 that is overpriced and that the arcane online reservation system seemed to indicate was fully booked forever, and 2 reasonably-priced ones located at opposite ends of haleakalā national park. i immediately went to reserve the two national park campgrounds online (our connected era is unfortunately unkind to walk-ins and spontaneity) and discovered that they only let you stay a maximum of three nights per 30 day period, so i would have to find somewhere else to stay as well.
doing research online, i was not liking the prices of any hotels or even airbnbs, despite the fact that they were supposed to be in the midst of some of vague wildfire-fear-inspired lack-of-visitors "crisis" that prompted low airfares. looking for inspiration, i opened up google maps and scrolled around the island area, but my view ended up settling on the nearby teardrop-shaped island of lanai. what goes on there? they seem to have 2 luxury hotels and one little "city" smack dab in the middle, and that's it. i looked it up on wikipedia as i usually do, and learned that the island used to be the world's largest pineapple plantation until the discovery of cheaper land and labor in the developing world. now 98% of the island is owned by sinister and shadowy tech billionaire larry ellison, who you rarely seem to hear about despite the fact that he's been stuck at like #5 on the world's richest people list for something like 20 years, i guess since his company oracle makes extremely unsexy business software and has become one of those "just a huge pile of money" tech companies that only "innovates" by buying smaller companies. lanai was out of the question for me since there's nowhere there to stay really for less than a thousand bucks a night, but then i discovered it's somehow not the least-visited island (that's publicly accessible, that is).
