Customer Reviews

Great information!

Lots of learning as we drove through. With the help of the guide we were able to prioritize the stops we made and the time spent at them.

# Banyan Driving strangers is a way to pass a day. Driving my own family through Hana, relaxed, happy, enjoying the place and each other, is something closer to the actual dream. I catch myself fantasizing about it sometimes, even with passengers — treating a stranger like an old friend, imagining a life where money isn't the thing deciding where you go, just curiosity and a full tank of gas. We used an app today, one that marks the beaches and the points of interest, and it was useful, and it's not how I actually like to travel. I like not knowing. That's the whole pleasure of moving through a place as a dragonfly — everything new because you haven't been told yet what's supposed to be good. The best thing today wasn't in the app. A huge banyan tree, no listing, no star rating, just suddenly there. Under it was another family — two girls, late teens or early twenties, climbing the branches like it was the obvious thing to do with a tree that size. I knew immediately they were getting bracelets. We talked, I told them about Harriet, the hospice patient who taught me to bead, who was also a delivery nurse, which still strikes me as exactly the right kind of person to have started this with. I leaned into the play of it, the Leela of it. Though I've been thinking: Leela and Maya are useful shorthand, but they're borrowed from religion, and I want something closer to the floor than that. Before any system gets installed in you, a puppy plays. A kid plays. That's the actual reference point, not Krishna, not Osho, not any of it. I grew up inside plenty of systems — Judaism, being Israeli, all of it — and I still reach for those words because they're the ones I have. But underneath the words, there's no religion in play itself. It's just the most natural thing there is. I gave the whole family bracelets under that tree and thought, for a second, about the Buddha under his own tree, and then reminded myself: it's all just myth, and mine happens to be a dragonfly with a scrap of fishing line in its legs. I'm not building a religion. I'm just trying to stay a kid a little longer, with beads instead of a slingshot. I thought about climbing it myself. I climbed a banyan once, years ago, in Costa Rica, and it was great. I'm fifty-seven now, and my body has opinions about that kind of great these days, so I stayed on the ground, handed out the bracelets, and sat beading with my daughter, whose name happens to be Maya, which felt almost too on the nose for the day I was having. Beaches, a swim under a waterfall, a minivan full of music on the way back — this is the driving gig I actually want, carting families around to play in beautiful places instead of just transporting them. I may never get to build that for real. Today I got to live inside it for a few hours, which might be the same thing. On the way back from Hana there was a coconut ice cream shop, vegan, absurdly good, with a rainbow painted on the sign that said something like "live your dream." I'd been joking all week about chasing rainbows, and there it was, spelling out the instructions directly. The whole day unfurled like one. Dinner after, music in the minivan, my family around me. A long history with minivans, me. A good one to add to the pile. One love, Gili

Fabulous directions and stopping instructions! It really helped me on my trip to Maui that I didn’t have much preparation for!

My husband and I went to Kauai right after a hurricane and mostly everything was closed on the island. We used this app to see everything on the island (that we could as some roads were closed). They have great stories and we found some really cool places!

We really enjoyed the tour up Haleakalā, and found towns and stops that we would have missed, but for the Shaka tour. The stories and history really illuminated our path.