Visit to Aquarium & Plantation Tour – Day 3

After the entire snorkel day activity yesterday, we started our next day little late. We kept it a light day activity. We first headed to the Maui Ocean Center – Hawaiian Aquarium in Maui.

The aquarium itself was a pretty small one that had some cool exhibits around the coral reef, turtle lagoons, hammerhead harbor, marine mammal discovery center etc. They also have the open ocean that has ~50 foot long acrylic tunnel with displays of sharks, sting rays and other fishes. As this is a small aquarium, we finished this activity around 1.5 hours. You will not need more than 2 hours to see this aquarium.

Maui Tropical Plantation tour was our next stop in the afternoon. This was a narrated tram tour that takes you though the 60 acre plantation area. This is a 45 min tour and you get to see all of the tropical flowers & fruits surrounded by a scenic & beautiful views.

On the way, they stop for like 10 mins and give an overview about coconuts – the guide also does a coconut husking demo that was something new for Arvind & Dhishita to watch. We were also given pieces of coconuts to taste. This is a pretty traditional one in India and coconut husking is a pretty common thing in India. Plus we use coconut as part of our cooking. Most of the tropical fruits & flowers were common and we were able to relate back home – we mainly did this tour for our kids to get to know the various tropical plantation flowers & fruits.

Their crops included sugarcane, papaya, mango, guava, bananas, taro, macadamia nuts, coffee etc.
I was reminded of the Guava, Mango and coconut trees at my home town when visiting this farm.

It was almost 4 in the evening and we wanted to watch the sunset in one of the beaches. Before heading out to the beach, we wanted to buy some fresh fish for dinner. We got some Tilapia’s and sword fish and other groceries.

We were right on time for the sunset and spent few hours at the beach. While enjoying the beauty of the sunset, lot of picture time spent as well :-). The kids went into their usual activity of playing in the sand.

A mouth watering dinner was prepared by the women – Vegetable Dum Biriyani & Fish Fry. This was the first time that I have tried out fish outside home – all ingredients were planned ahead and some were taken from home.