Maui Revealed: The Ultimate Guidebook (Maui Revealed) | Andrew Doughty

Maui Revealed: The Ultimate Guidebook (Maui Revealed) | Andrew Doughty | The best!

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Maui Revealed: The...

	Maui Revealed: The Ultimate Guidebook (Maui Revealed) Andrew Doughty Wizard Publications Inc., 2007 - 312 pages average customer review:based on 328 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Make your trip to Maui even better - read this book

My husband and I just returned from Hawaii this morning. I purchased this book on a friend's recommendation. While in Maui we rented a car and this book was our tour guide for everything from the sites worth seeing to the restaurants to visit to the best places to shop. This book was so worth the money and I would tell anyone who is planning a visit to Hawaii to pick up each and every "Revealed" book!

The best!

This book is the best! Very honest and specific. I have purchased this as gift for a friend going to Maui for their honeymoon. I gave it to them a few months early so they could read thru it. Maps and directions are awesome too!

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The best book for what to do (and not do) while visiting Maui

After visiting the island a few times, I met the author of this book at a book convention and became intrigued with his insights. And, after visiting the island numerous times since getting this book, I'd say it's the best thing available for finding out what Maui has to offer.

The restaurant reviews and other recommendations in this book are usually spot on, and the tips and hints about special sights to see--as well as the history of various locales--make the book invaluable.

I especially love the honesty about what is NOT good. Most of the other review books put a sugar-coating on every restaurant and every activity mentioned in their books. As a result, those books read more like advertisements than reviews. Fodor's is one example of this - don't even waste your money on its sugary-sweet "everything is wonderful" hype.

That said, I have to agree with many of the other reviews that critique Maui Revealed for its vagueness and perhaps (unintentionally) misleading descriptions about the ease of accessing some of the "off the beaten path" hikes.

The author of this book is a physically fit individual, so when the text says "a relatively easy hike," he's talking about it from his perspective. Unfortunately, I've seen relatively frail-looking people in their 50's and 60's who were trying to access some of these "relatively easy" hikes. At least one review on this book mentions tourists getting medivac'd to a hospital every few weeks as a result of trying to visit some of the sites this book recommends. Although I've not witnessed that, I can certainly see how it could happen.

Along these lines, keep in mind that the 'off the beaten path' walks recommended in this book are just that - off the beaten path. While you'll see this blue book on the dashboard of many cars, a lot of the places that require a short hike are not set up for tourists at all. No hand railings. No paved paths. In some places if you slip and fall you could end up falling a long way.

My advice: Take the author's physically fit athleticism into account when reading this, and evaluate each location with your own sense of what's safe for you and what's not. Just because the author says it's easy doesn't mean it will be easy for everyone.

Additionally, I also agree with the observation that details on how to access some of these hikes are vague. On more than one occasion I and the people I was with gave up and turned around because nothing we were seeing was like anything described in the book.

For all this critique, I still think this book is the best available for learning where to go / where not to go on Maui. If for no other reason, get this book to learn about the island's history. For example, you can drive past a non-descript location a dozen times and not think anything of it. But in Maui Revealed you might learn that some famous event occurred at that site more than 100 years ago. It's those kind of golden nuggets that set the book apart from the standard tourist publications, which are mainly focused on getting you to spend money in a particular location.

Bottom line, if you're going to Maui - or even if you've been there before - this is the one book I recommend you have with you. You'll need to engage your common sense, but you'll probably have a much more fulfilling trip from the insights and tips this book provides.

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Great Planning Guide

As a wedding and event planner, I use the Ultimate Hawaii guides when I plan Hawaiian honeymoons for my clients. I find them to be a great source of information. I've been to many of the places that are critiqued in the guides and, for the most part, their reviews are very accurate. I've only had a few occasions where I've found a review to be inaccurate. Overall, these guides are very useful.

Stephanie Wood, Zitan Weddings

Good Book but Causes Problems in Hawaii

This was the first of the Revealed guidebooks that we've owned back in 2002. And from that first usage of the book, we were blown away by how candid its reviews were and how it seemed to present every nook and cranny of the island.

We consulted it for local restaurants, dinner splurges, and most (if not all) of Maui's reasonably accessible waterfalls (including the Blue Pool, Waihe'e Valley, 'Ohe'o Gulch, etc).

We liked this book so much that we bought all the other Revealed guidebooks for each of the other main Hawaiian Islands.

Fast forward 5 years (and several trips to all the Hawaiian Islands)...

The Blue Pool - closed due to unhappy residents lamenting the traffic; Upper Puohokamoa Falls - access closed due owner's fear of slip-and-fall lawsuit; Venus Pool - kapu due to trespassing; Waihe'e Valley - closed to public except for Eco-Maui tours; Proliferation of No Trespassing signs everywhere...

That's when we realized that while this book tells you everything you want to hear with the attitude and spunk that we can appreciate, it's problematic in that it has resulted in (thanks to its popularity) increased cases of trespassing, closures from frivolous slip-and-fall lawsuits, deaths from following their "Adventures", a tourism economy dependent on reviews from this book (e.g. you can expect higher prices if they got an Ono rating and closures if they got bad reviews), and overexposure/high impacts to fragile and endangered habitats.

I think it's sad that more and more parts of Maui (as well as other islands) have lost their spirit of Aloha, and I suspect this book's well-deserved popularity has something to do with it.

But even with all that said, my wife and I still consult this book because we feel we're getting good advice from a kama'aina (long time resident). It just shows how useful this book is despite the problems it's causing. But I sense it's starting to become a victim of its own success and the island is becoming a far different place than the paradise that was originally envisioned and communicated by the book when we first used it.

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