Advice from a pineapple vendor

One of the great things about vacations to far off destinations is that many times the locals are experienced dealing with tourists. They can spot you from miles away and usually can sense if you are loose with your wallet. Sometimes I think they play tricks on you and later laugh about it with their friends.

While in Maui last week my brother and I stopped at a pullout along a cliff on the North Shore. We struck up a conversation with a man and his friend, a pineapple vendor with a bright yellow van. From our vantage point we watched surfers ride large waves and sea turtles break the surface of the water and dive back down again. One of the men let us use his binoculars, so we got some good looks at these attractions.


Soon our attention was turned to the vendor's van, which was definitely not stock. It had racks on the outside lined with fresh pineapples. He invited us to look more closely at the van then seamlessly transitioned into his sales pitch. He usually sold the pineapples for $7 but today we could get one for $5. His specialty was to cut off the top the fruit, slice the rest of it into chunks and hand it to you in its shell with a straw and plastic fork.

While he was talking, he took a pineapple off the rack and cut the top off and gave us a sample. How could we not buy this pineapple? Would it go to waste? Keith bought it and all seemed good -- that is until they gave us some bad advice.

We asked if we should continue on the road along the north end of the island and loop back into a main highway or turn around and go back the way we came. Pineapple man said since we were first timers and may never be back that we should continue on and see as much as we could.

It sounded reasonable, so we did.

A few miles later we encountered the narrowest road I have ever been on. We continued on it for a mile or so but decided to turn around because the cliffs on one side of the road and sheer drop off on the other was just too terrifying.

Here is some video of the road I found on the Internet:

We did not get out of the car to take a picture because if we would have opened a car door and gotten out, we could have fallen to our deaths.

Here is how another blogger described his journey down this road:

We drove from Lahaina around the far Western portion of Maui to Wailukui today. I knew that some of this road was one lane, but I wasn't prepared for how narrow that one lane was, and how terrifying the drop-offs were to thousands of feet below with no guard-rails for much of the road.

We did end up driving by the pineapple vendor again, but we didn't stop to confront him. I was driving and just thankful to be alive and headed back to a resort where I knew I would be treated like an Hawaiian king.

As someone who knows a little bit about what it is like to be a Hawaiian king, trust me when I say, never take idle advice from a pineapple vendor who wears only shorts, flip flops and a boar husk necklace.