K A U A I , H A W A I I

This April, Miranda and I decided to spend a vacation/belated honeymoon on the island of Kauai. This is the first Hawaiian Island we've visited, and it was a blast! Here are some fun facts about the island:

"The Garden Island"
*Home to Waimea Canyon - the 3,500 ft deep "Grand Canyon of the Pacific"
*111 mi of coastline, with the sandiest beaches of all the islands
*The oldest of the Hawaiian Islands - formed 5.8 million years ago
*Kauai's Mt. Waialeale is one of the wettest spots on earth, averaging 450 inches of rain per year!
*Kauai's highest mountain is Kawaikini Peak at 5,243 feet
*Kauai's building code dictates that "no building shall be taller than a Coconut Palm" thus the 4 story limit on vertical construction. 

Here you can see Kauai in relation to the other islands....the only other Hawaiian Island further west is Niihau (which is mostly uninhabited)

Here is some interesting geology 101 on the Hawaiian Islands: they were formed as the result of a hot spot in the earth's mantle, as the Pacific plate slowly (over millions of years) moves to the NW.  This helps one to understand why Kauai is one of the oldest, and most eroded islands. Also why it supposedly has the most sandy beaches of all the islands. 

Here's another fun map of the island. The yellow stars are places/hikes/beaches/waterfalls we visited, along with a "how much did it inspire us" grade. The red stars are the three towns we stayed in during our 10 day trip.

The Honolulu Airport had some beautiful lush green gardens - perfect after a 5 hour flight. Just a different world than CO.

We arrived in Kauai late in the evening, but the next day made sure to get out on a hike right away. This particular hike led to a pool with a rope swing and a beautiful set of waterfalls. Skateboarding down the creek!

No one here....very very nice place. You can see the pool and the rope swing on the far right of the picture. 

It required a rotten, interesting and somewhat dangerous down-climb to get to. 

Beach side dinners are hard to beat!

This is an interesting piece of boat rope actually

Look hard and you might see 'em!

One day, we checked out Larsen's Beach, which we were extremely lucky to see a good bit of wildlife (including a few nude beachgoers)

Looks like its beer o'clock

Pillow basalt: formed from hot lava underwater being cooled as it touches the ocean water.

These are Monk Seals - and this guy happened to be taking a nap right beside the sign that warns about Monk seals in the area. How convenient of him. 

They gorge themselves on fish, and then take a sun-belly nap to help digest.

We had one problem: there was actually a second Monk seal sleeping 10 feet up the beach from the first, and we had to walk right in between them:

100 yards past the Monk Seal, we found sea turtles!

These guys were slow moving, and didn't really care about us. 

Soooo cute. 

Next day, we just had to do a portion of the world famous Kalalau Trail. Even though it rained the whole time on us, and it was a super highway of hikers, it was gorgeous. We saw baby blue whales jumping out of the water a half mile offshore. 

75 degrees and rain.....we wore rain jackets for part of the time but others had synthetic puffy jackets on because of the "cold winter weather"........riiiiiight.

Pretty steep vertical drops into the ocean below the trail

We soon reached the first major river crossing. We had plans to continue on a trail to some waterfalls several miles further, but a ranger at the river advised us to keep a close watch on it. Due to the amount of rain that had been falling over the past few days, the river can quickly become uncrossable. In fact, we were told a group of 42 people the previous night had been stranded on the wrong side of the river and had to spend the night there unprepared. So we decided to play it safe, because we like beds and eating and showers and dry clothes. 

We turned around here, at Hanakapei Beach. There was no sand because during the winter swells, all of the sand that is normally there in the summer time is washed out/under water.

This is a fun sign - but judging from the tourists we saw, its necessary to remind visitors they aren't in Disneyland, and also do not assume people have common sense because they don't. 

A wild "beach" lion hungry for anything

City of cairns makes this a really unique place to eat your lunch

As much fun as we had on the Kalalau Trail, we enjoyed our time even more walking around in the woods next to Ke'e Beach...

Magical, magical place

We always love snorkeling when there are opportunities to do it. However, visiting Kauai in April, it turns out most of the beaches were too rough to get in the water. This place was an exception, although the underwater life was a little sad. 

Kitesurfing looks like a sport I'd take up if I lived here. 

We checked a couple different farmer's markets, and picked up some fresh fruit. 

Our next adventure was outside of a cute little town we stayed in called Kilauea. We biked and hiked through a mahogany forest, which led to a beautiful manicured garden where an old mill used to be.

Just needs a brontosaurus poking its head out above the trees....

Kitty!!!

We've made it to the old mill site!

Bamboo!!!

Next, we checked out the resorty town of Princeville, which was still very beautiful.

What a great way to summarize this place. 

Welcome to "Secret" Beach. We saw a few eccentric characters here, including a guy with long hair, with a cape tied around his neck, in a speedo, wielding a stick like a wand. We also saw a guy with parachute pants doing the splits while juggling; we also saw a woman with pigtails dancing around to the crash of the waves playing a violin :)

Again, this beach apparently has amazing snorkeling, but not this time of year...the waves were crashing much too large to really even get in the water. 

This area had some really cool tidal waves. Apparently numerous people here have been swept out to sea and crushed against the rocks by assymetric "rogue" waves...so we paid attention. 

We've gotten about as far as we can on this beach...

The next day, the host of the place we stayed at had paddle boards she let us use. So we paddled up a slow moving river, and then went on a hike-a-bushwhack for about an hour to some neat waterfalls.

Time to eddy out and start hiking.

Reaching the goal

After spending the first week or so on the much greener and rainier north side of the island, it was time to move south (hotter & drier). This is one of the more beautiful beaches on the south side in my opinion....called Mahaulepu Beach.  This beach has many petrified sand dunes that drop abruptly into the ocean.....also lots of crabs. 

Yay crabs!

If I lived on this island....the south was pretty cool....and muuuuch sunnier. 

We arrived at the final destination of the trip: the Waimea Plantation Cottages. It comes highly recommended. Very peaceful, open, and calming.

Out on the porch....

Wandering around the cottages was kind of like roaming a new beautiful campground in a foreign place.

This is the one we stayed in.

The bird life around here was really fun to watch.

While we stayed here, we cooked all of our own meals and ate outside constantly. 

Always geckos for entertainment

Do we HAVE to go back to snowy Colorado????

We're literally as happy as can be hanging out here...

The Banyan Tree: not native to Hawaii and originally from India, the first one was brought to Hawaii in 1873. So as big as these trees are, they are no more than ~140 years old.

I read up on these trees, and one in India spans nearly half a mile in perimeter and has nearly 3,000 different trunks. Another super cool thing about this tree is that as its canopy grows outwards, it slowly drops hanging "roots" above the ground. Over time, these things finally reach the ground, and become an actual root/new trunk part of the tree, helping to support its widening. You can see some of these hanging new root shoots in this photo above Miranda's head. 

Nearchus, an admiral of Alexander the Great, described a large specimen of this tree on the banks of the Narmada River in India, and supposedly the tree's canopy was so extensive it sheltered 7000 men.

Of course, Mrs Miranda has to climb up into the tree!

She's a natural tree-poser

Its hard to capture the scale of these trees in photos. As you can see, we were obsessed with these trees.

Our next adventure of the trip was hiking the "Alkali Swamp Trail". For some cruel reason, Andrew decided this hike would be "fun". We did have fun, but it wasn't quite what we expected. As you might expect, hiking through a swamp was pretty muddy, stagnant, and the overlook at the end was completely fogged in, so there was no overlook. The boardwalk in many places was in poor condition, which made avoiding the mud very tough. 

The start of the trail was nice enough, a little foretelling of things to come....

This view 1/4 mi after the start was one of the best. 

This particular part of the trail we refer to as the "mud canyon slip-n-slide"...Even though the rock here is basalt, the island gets so much rain that it quickly weathers and turns to this horrible clay. For this part of the trail, it took us nearly a couple hours to go under a mile, all the while trying to avoid completely succumbing to a full "mud" experience. Many other hikers on this trail were also struggling, cussing, and we were quite suprised by some of their attire. One woman had bright white converse sneakers on.......WHY?!?

Embrace zee mud

Finally, some rotton wood beats the mud.

Thataway

We've finally made it to one of the, if not the "highest swamp in the world" according to some sources.

It was foggy, swampy, and the boardwalk quickly proceeded into the swamp.

Apparently "love locks" are a thing. 

On our drive back down from the Alkali Swamp trail, we stopped to look down into the Grand Canyon of the Pacific - Waimea Canyon. 

Pretty spectacular 

I wish we had time to go in there....

Can never turn down a coconut

One of the last must see beaches we visited was Polihale. This beach is nearly 17 miles long, and dead ends right into sea cliffs. Pretty spectacular place. 

The sand was so hot here that I wore socks, haha

The goofy side

Our last evening on the trip, we took a sunset tour of the famed Napali Coast, and the weather held out. We saw some dolphins, which was also cool.

Parts of Jurassic Park were filmed near this area.

Inevitably, people on these types of boats in rougher waves will get sick. We were not one of them, and we embraced the open bar, as you can tell from Miranda's smile ;)

What a beautiful sunset.....

We always always love visiting tropical places. Kauai was certainly beautiful and we enjoyed it very much. Our next trip we'd like to go somewhere probably in SE Asia....hopefully soon!