We flew from San Francisco to Maui after a week. We weren’t able to rent a car because my license had been stolen along with my daypack in Mexico. This, along with the not-so-great public transport on the island and the location of the exorbitantly overpriced apartment we rented, led to us not seeing a whole lot of Maui at all. We went to the beach once or twice and spent what felt like most of our time Skype-calling several car rental and car sharing companies and getting frustrated because we couldn’t really go anywhere. At least, the weather wasn’t great either so we didn’t miss that much. I took one single photo on Maui, which is why I’m skipping right to the Big Island here.

The first three weeks, the weather was unusually bad on that island, too. We stayed at my uncle’s coffee farm and since we still weren’t able to rent a car – and one of their cars broke down right before we arrived – we were kind of stuck on the farm. We spent most of our time working on the farm until, a few weeks later, my new license arrived from Switzerland. The weather had improved in the meantime and temperatures reached an all-time high. So after around four weeks of farm work, we finally rented a car and ventured out. We visited the active volcano Kīlauea (which went wild soon after we left Hawaii) to see the steam vents and the splashing lava lake, went swimming on several paradisal beaches and drove up and down and around the island to see as much as we possibly could.

I did some work, too, during those last few weeks of our trip: After having photographed for Drift Magazine in San Francisco, I did some work for Let’s Explore Magazine and Standart Magazine in Hawaii.