Indiana Jones and Iron Man: location, location, location

by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer

We moved into the summer movie season this weekend and as usual the West is making cameos as every locale from Afghanistan to the Amazon. Even in an era of increasingly sophisticated computer generated effects, nothing beats location shooting, as two of the year’s biggest movies, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are proving. (For a look at some of these and other film locations, check out Vacation On Location at fandango.com.)

Living in SoCal, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing places I know pop up on screen, even in comic book movies such as Iron Man.  Movies always require a certain suspension of disbelief, but this one a bit more so than usual thanks to its use of familiar locations.

Tony Stark’s mansion for example was computer generated then plopped down on one of my favorite coastal spots, Malibu’s Point Dume— which luckily has stayed mostly free of such architectural megalomania. There are key scenes at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a building that managed to look every bit as futuristic as Tony’s home, while the Alabama Hills and the Eastern Sierra near Lone Pine stood in (and convincingly) for Afghanistan.

Along with Kanab, Utah and Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border, Lone Pine is one of several remote spots around the West with a long movie tradition. Filmmaking in this High Desert Hollywood dates to the 1920s and the stark landscape has appeared in numerous westerns, as well as in epics ranging from Gunga Din to Gladiator.

Each October, the community hosts the Lone Pine Film Festival, which features screenings and tours of movie locations, including a special guided trip, Iron Man and Beyond, that will take visitors out to sites used in the film. The Lone Pine Film History Museum (which has a new Iron Man exhibit) also offers an excellent self-guided tour brochure with ten stops in the Alabama Hills along what has come to be known as Movie Road.

Indiana Jones also made extensive use of western landscapes. The movie opens in Nevada, which is actually played by New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch northwest of Santa Fe. With appearances in 3:10 To Yuma and The Missing, Ghost Ranch has emerged as a go-to filming location in recent years. Then again, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard et al have nothing on artist Georgia O’Keeffe; she moved to the area in the 1930s and eventually lived for 50 years around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu.

The landscape became synonymous with her art, and she described it as “perfectly mad looking country—hills and cliffs and washes too crazy to imagine all thrown up into the air by God and let tumble where they would. It was certainly as spectacular as anything I’ve ever seen—and that was pretty good.”

The other major location for Indiana Jones is the Puna District on the Big Island south of Hilo. Spielberg used the dense jungles of this, the wet side of the Big Island, during a chase scene that ranks with the best in the Jones series. The swinging vines and chaotic thickets of albizzia and wild guava are the botanical opposite of the open high desert expanses of Ghost Ranch. It helps give the movie the geographic sweep that viewers have come to expect in the Indiana Jones films and is a reminder of what Hollywood has known for generations: to see the world, all you have to do is get out and explore Sunset’s West.

(Movie Stills copyright Paramount Pictures)

For the best of Maui's upcountry ride the road to Kula, and visit a winery too

By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

Yesterday I wrote about cool things you should do in Paia. Here’s what you should NOT do:

Bike down Haleakala. Hundreds of yahoos pay top dollar to get up at O-dark-thirty a.m., squeeze into a van with a bunch of strangers, drive all the way up to Haleakala National Park to freeze while watching the sunrise, and then ride bike cruiser bikes the 38 miles down back to town. A friend who lives right along the highway says he sees people crash right outside his house all the time. Don’t be a dork: skip it.

If you are wondering where you should ride, I suggest taking the road less traveled: start in the tiny upcountry town of Keokea and ride 15 or so miles out to the Kula region of East Maui. (Or however far you want to go; just turn around when you’re tired.)

Here’s why:

1. Because up here you’d be hard pressed to see a single car (have the road to yourself!), much less another cyclist.

2. Because the scenery up here is totally different from down below.
This is ranch country: think horses in fields, flowering jacarandas, eucalyptus trees. Further down the road the landscape changes to lava moonscape.

3. Because the views are unreal from way up here.

4. Because you can start and end your ride at Grandma’s Bakery, where the pastries are homemade and the organic coffee was grown on the slopes of Haleakala.

5. Because you can start and end your ride at Tedeschi Vineyards, Maui’s only winery, housed in a pretty white cottage that I wouldn't mind living in.

So start training.

The best things to do in Paia, Maui's coolest little town

By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

Here’s a dirty little confession: Until recently, I was anti-Maui. I’d never been there but I didn’t really want to. The place gets so much love and so much press that it sapped my curiosity.

But Paia, the little plantation town en route to Hana, made me change my mind. Paia is heaven on earth. It’s small, quirky, and bohemian. I’d move there in a heartbeat if anyone would give me a job there. (Anyone?)

So, now that vacation season is upon us, I suggest you go to Paia. Once there, here are the cool things to do:

1. Watch windsurfers strut their stuff—or to strut your own, at Ho’okipa Beach. This is what people come here for.

2. Swim at Baby Beach, which is technically called Paia Bay, in the neighboring town of Spreckelsville. (You can easily walk here from Paia, even barefoot in the sand if you wish.)

A reef close to shore creates a calm, sandy-bottomed pool that’s great for baby and you.

3. Eat breakfast at Cafe des Amis, a warm, artsy little place with a chalkboard menu of Mediterranean and Indian crepes and wraps,  both sweet and savory. My spinach and feta wrap was delish. So was my baby’s chocolate banana crepe (which I ate most of). My baby drank all of my mango smoothie. I didn’t share my latte, because it was to good.

4. Get groceries at Mana Foods. This place had me in a frenzy. I wanted to move to Paia just to shop here. The produce was so prime it was like art. The prepared food was so wholesome and fresh that I bought several pounds of it. And the wall of gourmet chocolate bars—well, you can imagine. Any store with a wall of chocolate deserves a visit.

5. Meet and eat at Flatbread Pizza Company. This is where Paia’s nightlife happens (it’s one of the few places to stay open late), and it also happens to have the best pizza on the island: wood-fired, with all organic ingredients like homemade maple-fennel sausage and organic produce.

Tomorrow: Come back for the one thing you should NOT do in Paia.

Livin' La Vida Lava

by Matthew Jaffe, senior writer, Sunset

With all of the focus on this year’s Earth Day, my thoughts keep returning to the best place I know of to experience our world as a living planet.

When you visit Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, geology ceases to be a study focused on the remote past and instead takes on a right-this-second immediacy. That’s especially true these days as lava flows are again reaching the ocean to create the newest land on Earth. And last month, the summit of Kilauea experienced its first explosive eruption since 1924.

My wife Becky and I try to get to the Big Island every year and spend at least a couple days up at the volcano. A few years back, we hiked across the jagged lava field at the end of Chain of Craters Road to flows and hotspots near the ocean’s edge. The smell of burning wood from forest fires touched off by lava at higher elevations drifted through the air and steam rose high into the sky as the lava met the surf. Primal stuff.

When we visited last fall, the action had shifted and lava was flowing near the park from the vent at Pu’u ‘O’o. The area was too remote to reach and so we instead hiked some of our favorite trails, including the four-mile loop at Kilauea Iki Crater and a half-day loop trek to Halema’uma’u Crater that started from Devastation Trail. We could have practically driven to the edge of the crater, the dwelling place of the volcano deity Pele. But the six-mile walk across the caldera’s moonscape took on the meditative quality of a pilgrimage.

While much of the park is covered with barren expanses of lava, other areas are cloaked with cloud forests of ‘ohi’a and fern.  Emerging from these lush jungles and onto the blackness of Kilauea Caldera or Kilauea Iki is like traveling from rainforest to desert in an instant. The only greenery in the calderas is the occasional pioneering plant that has found a bit of soil in the rock’s fissures.

We’re looking forward to getting back this year and hope to catch some of the action. While there have been some eruption-related closures of roads and trails (and even a brief shutdown of the park for a couple days) boat trips are now taking visitors to areas where the lava meets the ocean. And there’s no better time to experience this place than when it is most alive.

Maui discovery: A pineapple to remember

By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

Let’s say you’ve had it with lounging on the beach and drinking mai tais in Maui. Not likely, true, but let’s just pretend. What else is there to do?

Here’s what: Get thyself to Kapalua Resort for a Maui Gold Pineapple Tour. Priced at $39.95 (express tour) to $65 (full three-hour tour) including samples and a pineapple to take home, it’s one of the best cultural experiences Maui has to offer.

As you ride a funky yellow bus through muddy puddles up a bumpy hill your tour guide will regale you with facts about pineapple (who knew there are over 200 kinds of pineapple, that it's a super antioxidant, or that it’s easy to grow your own pineapple simply by potting the crown?) and point out where the plantation workers used to live. Once off the bus you'll traipse through pineapple fields with a view of Kapalua Bay. When your tour guide picks a golden pineapple and whacks off big slices for you to taste before tossing the still-full-of-meat pineapple back into the dirt, you might find yourself shouting: "Wait, I'll eat that!," as I almost did.

Then you bite into your chunk. It's the sweetest taste imaginable. It's also messy sticky and the strings get stuck in your teeth, but who cares? Now you know what pineapple is supposed to taste like.

Maui Gold Pineapple Tour: 808/665-5491

Classic Hawaii....Diamonds and ice

By Peter Fish, Sunset editor-at-large

I just got back from a family vacation to Hawaii—specifically, Oahu and Maui. My wife and 10-year-old son had never been to the islands, so taking the opportunity to boss them around I made them do all my favorite island activities with me.  Luckily, they liked the classics as much as I do: Pearl Harbor (which my son described as “moving and sad”) and tropical drinks at the Royal Hawaiian.

But maybe the highlight was the hike up Diamond Head. This is one of my favorite treks in the world. It’s anything but uncrowded—you walk, slowly, behind groups of hikers from all over the world. And it’s not that long—only about ¾ miles from the arid center of the crater to the Observation Station at the top of the rocky crater rim. The journey earns “hike” rather than “walk” status mainly from the series of switchbacks, followed by steep stairs, that carry you to top.

But once you get there, WOW. What can you see? Pretty much the whole world.  To the west, the shiny tourist towers of Waikiki, to the north, the velvet green folds of the Koolau Range. To the east, the posh precincts of Kahala and the bump of Koko Head, and everywhere else the Pacific, rippling with swells in the foreground, seemlessly blue beyond.  People stand at the observation platform, raise their cell phones to take snapshots and then call their friends back home. Look, you hear them saying, look where I am, secure in the knowledge that their friends can’t be any place as beautiful as this.

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Any good hike requires a post-hike treat. The classic post-Diamond-Head hike treat is shave ice. Shave ice is the Hawaiian snow cone, although you are never supposed to call it that.  And in truth, the traditional snow cone is to shave ice what Dancing With the Stars is to the New York City Ballet. The snow cone is amusing and coarse. Shave ice is supple and elegant. The most famous shave ice place in Hawaii—maybe the world—is Matsumoto’s on Oahu’s North Shore. It’s a great spot, but after a Diamond Head hike you don’t want to drive all the way to the North Shore.  You want something closer.

I’m pleased to say we found the perfect venue: Waiola Bakery and Shave Ice II, on Kapahulu just five minutes’ drive from the trail at Diamond Head. Step inside and you worry you’ve ventured into Seinfeld Soup-Nazi territory.  A sign advises you to request your shave ice by answering the following questions in the following order:

1. How many?

2. What size?

3. Anything inside or top?

4. No flavor please! Wait for us to ask the flavor.

But in practice things are a lot more relaxed. And Waiola’s shave ice is...phenomenal.  All the standard fruit flavors (raspberry, orange) are here, plus some tropical specialties, not to mention add-ons like azuki beans and mochi balls. We didn’t go for those—a fellow customer cautioned that they were for shave ice experts—but the pina colada shave ice topped with a Snow Cap (sweetened condensed milk) was so good it made me want to hike up Diamond Head again, just to earn another one.

Diamond Head State Monument, off Diamond Head Road Between Makapu'u Avenue and 18th Avenue, Honolulu. (Download the trail brochure.)  Waiola Bakery & Shave Ice II
525 Kapahulu Avenue, corner of Telephone:  808.735.8886