It found that life in the counterculture. Through the 1960s and 1970s a wave of artists, surfers and free spirits drifted in and claimed the sleepy sugar town as their unofficial capital. The pastel storefronts filled with galleries, boutiques and a now-legendary natural-foods market on Baldwin Avenue; on the one main street, old-school hippies, professional surfers and new-age wanderers brushed shoulders. The vibe turned barefoot and bohemian, a slice of the Summer of Love frozen on a Hawaiian shore. Pāʻia became "the hippest little town on Maui," and the easygoing, salt-tousled feel from those years never left.
Our Pāʻia logo carries the Hawaiian hibiscus over "Hawaiian Kingdom · Est. 1795," the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Hawaiʻi place, printed in clean retro black-and-white like an old travel decal. The hibiscus stands for the islands as a whole; what makes this one Pāʻia is everything around it — the pastel plantation storefronts, the wind at Hoʻokipa, the bohemian Baldwin Avenue soul, and the salt smell of the North Shore where the road to Hāna begins.
Why People Visit Pāʻia
Pāʻia offers a whole mood in one small town: bohemian, barefoot charm, world-class wind and surf, and the romance of the open road to Hāna. It is the coolest little town on Maui — and for the artists, surfers and free spirits who live here, simply home, the place where old Maui still feels like itself.
