Many people visiting Hawaii experience Classic Maui, which I described in detail in my previous blog post. What our family loves to do when we travel is to go off the beaten path, stop at local farms, eat off the land and learn about local cuisine. Maui provides a lot of opportunities for agricultural tourism: farm tours and culinary adventures. Maui farm tours should definitely be on the top of your list of things to do on the island!
It is sad that most of the tourists don’t venture beyond coastal areas and may be Haleakala National Park but on the way to Haleakala summit there is a whole region called “Up Country Maui” which will give you the best flavor of the land. There also several farms and plantations that you can visit throughout the island depending on what is of interest to you (fruits, coffee, alcohol, etc.) I will provide a review of the best places we visited on a one day self-guided Maui farms tour.
UP COUNTRY MAUI FARMS TOUR
A comprehensive tour of this area will take a full day so I suggest you start earlier rather than later, which should not be a problem if you flew from the mainland U.S. For the first several days you will be waking up on U.S. mainland time. It is best if you check weather forecast in advance and choose a day when it won’t rain in Up Country or rain just a little (use the town of Kula as your location for the weather forecast). The views from the mountain down to the island and the ocean are splendid when it is not overcast.
Maui farms tour Stop # 1: Surfing Goat Farm
This is is a working farm that offers various tours of the facility and cheese tasting. We booked a morning farm tour, without milking goats. It lasted 27 minutes and in all honesty you would be better off without it. It consists of 2 main parts: feeding the goats with a brief history of the farm and learning about milking equipment (not operational at the time) and explanation of the milking process. Cheese tasting is not included in the tour! We paid almost 50 dollars for a family of four (no discounts for kids above 2 years old) and it was not a good value.
The better way to visit this farm is just show up, no reservations are necessary, feed the goats on your own (they are everywhere, they come to the fences and let you pet them and give them grass that grows right there at your feet) and just do the cheese tasting (you pay for it separately anyway). Add a couple of decadent goat cheese truffles to the tasting and you will be in heaven! Both the cheeses and truffles are exceptionally good. An added bonus at the farm – a mall playground area for younger kids.
Maui farms tour Stop # 2: Maui Wine winery
Maui Wine is a great place to visit. It has surprisingly good wine. They produce both classic grape wines and tropical pineapple wines. The latter is quite tasty when chilled and is perfect as a base for a fruity sangria. There are 3 types of tastings you can choose depending on what wines you like. After the tasting I suggest you walk around the winery’s beautiful grounds: they have a small sculpture and botanical garden.
Maui farms tour Stop # 3: Grandma’s Coffee House
At this point in your journey it will be time for lunch so I suggest you stop at Grandma’s Coffee House, which will be on your way to Stop 4 of the Maui farms tour. It offers a variety of good lunch sandwiches and classic Hawaiian pork. But the best part is their bakery offering an amazing banana bread. Banana bread is a staple on Maui and it is sold at almost every cafe and most of fruit stands. I made a point of trying banana bread everywhere I went and none of the loaves I bought came close to the one at Grandma’s! It is homemade and absolutely delicious, especially with macadamia nuts.
Maui farms tour Stop # 4:. Kula Botanical Garden
Even tough Kula garden is not, technically, a Maui farm tour, it is a wonderful place that I promise you will love! And it is on your way anyway – no detour necessary.
Maui does not have sprawling botanical gardens. Each of the local gardens are small and privately owned. May be that’s why they are sometimes overlooked by tourists but it played to our benefit. We strolled these lush grounds with just a couple of other visitors. It was very tranquil and immensely beautiful, every bit of it bursting with bright colors of tropical flowers.
Maui farms tour Stop # 5: Lavender Farm
The Lavender Farm must be gorgeous in good weather. Not only it has fields of different variety of lavender but also a lot of tropical plants and fantastic views of Maui coast down below. Unfortunately, we visited it in foggy and rainy weather (which is common on the slopes of Haleakala – the weather can change very quickly, so be prepared). Even so, we really enjoyed the farm and the lavender tea. The lavender coffee, on the other hand, was not the best. There was an air of mystery about the place covered in fog, which felt almost surreal. This place offers a self-guided farm tour.
Maui farms tour Stop # 6: Tropical Plantation
Maui Tropical Plantation is located in the town of Wailuku. Since it is not located in Up Country you won’t have time to visit it the same day as Stops 1-5 on my suggested Maui farm tour.
Maui Tropical Plantation has a different vibe than Up Country. It felt much more touristy and left me in two minds. On the one hand, the guided farm tour was a bit superficial. The main reason for this is that you don’t need to go on a tour to see bananas, papaya, sugar cane in Maui – they are growing all over the island.
On the other hand, the coconut presentation was fantastic. We learnt so much about how to husk, open, consume, store and even grow it. I this Maui farm tour had similar presentations about other fruits and nuts. May be they would not have time to cover all of the fruit they grow but I would have preferred to learn in depth about a couple of plants than a little about a lot.
I was especially disappointed that there was no special presentation about macadamia nuts, a distinctly Hawaiian plant, even though it grows on the plantation. It was a nice bonus that they at least give you a free small bowl of fruit at the end of the farm tour. The plantation also has a huge gift store with various Hawaiian goodies. It is a good place to buy good quality souvenirs from chocolates to Hawaiian shirts.
THINGS YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TO TRY ON MAUI
Maui Gold pineapple – it is much sweeter than a regular pineapple and has very low acidity, absolutely delicious! generally I recommend to stop at fruit stands, which are plenty on the island, as much as possible and buy all your fruits there. The difference between fruits at the fruit stands and grocery stores was tangible in terms of freshness and quality.
Fruit smoothies or popsicles – those are typically sold at the fruit stands or off special food trucks
Hawaiian shaved ice – I am not a fan of shaved ice generally because it typically tastes artificial. We found that on Maui they add more variety of natural, fruit based syrups and such shaved ice was very tasty.
Hawaiian BBQ – preferably, at Ka Haku Smoke Shack on the road to Hana (see full description in my Classic Maui post)
Fish tacos at the Coconut’s Fish Cafe – this cafe is a famous Maui institution, they have been Zagat rated and were featured in Travel + Leisure magazine. They claim they have the best fish tacos in the world and I would tend to agree. If you want a quick trip to Maui without actually taking a flight to Maui I will tell you a secret: Coconut’s Fish Cafe has now locations open in California (Cupertino, Sacramento and LA)
Malasadas – these are a Portuguese confection, made of egg-sized balls of yeast dough that are deep-fried in oil, coated with granulated sugar and filled with custard. They are similar to donuts but much better. Yummy!
Roselani ice cream – Roselani is a Maui based ice cream company that produces heavenly treats with tropical flavors. We tried mango, macadamia nuts and Kona mud pie and we loved all of them. The same as with fish tacos above, you can get this taste of Maui on the mainland too – the photo below is from Whole Foods store’s website that sells this ice cream.
Banana Bread – as mentioned above, it should only come from Grandma’s
Coconut water drink – as in whole coconut with a straw inside.
ADDITIONAL TIPS
Since we rented a condo on Maui we ate a lot at home but we tried to eat Hawaiian food as much as we could. We bought a locally made teriyaki marinade and used it to BBQ meat and salmon – both came out great with pretty much no effort (just marinate the meat or fish overnight and grill). We also ate a lot of locally grown fruit in addition to pineapple: papaya, mangoes and watermelons are very good on the island. But tomatoes and cucumbers are not good at all, unfortunately. We searched the place over and we never found a decent tomato or a cucumber, either in a grocery store or at a market. Also, don’t waste your money on passion fruit – it is not worth it, honestly.
For a great wine tasting card to take with you for tasting (wineries don’t usually provide any and if they do they are dismal), please, visit my SHOP page. I have designed this handy card so that it is easy to use for both experienced wine lovers and beginners alike. You will receive a PDF file which you can re-use as many times as you like.
If you would like to explore Maui off the beaten path, check out unusual things to do in Maui.
EDIBLE SOUVENIRS
If you want to bring some edible souvenirs from Up Country I suggest you take a small portable cooler
with some ice packs
with you. You can use it as lunch carrier for your flight too (if you fly United, which I strongly recommend you don’t, their lunch options are not good).
If you are going to bring wine home, please, remember that you cannot put it in hand luggage, it will be confiscated.
If you want to bring fruit from Hawaii into the mainland USA, well, bad luck, you can’t. Except for pineapples. We confirmed that with the agricultural control representatives at the airport. However, you can bring back chocolate, coffee, tea, banana bread and macadamia nuts without any issues.
If you found this Maui farm tour itinerary useful, please do me a little favor and share this information with others, for there is a good chance that it will help them with their travel plans. Sharing is caring. 🙂
