Travel: October 2006 Archives
Today is our last full day on the island... I was going to work on pictures (there are definitely a few more for the gallery) but instead I am just going to soak in the last of the lovely island weather and feelings before we have to pack up and head home. Unlike some vacations I've been on, I always find it difficult to leave Hawaii. There is something undefinably special about this place.
And it's been such a great trip... canyon hikes, beach strolls, dramatic sunsets, snorkeling that included several up-close interludes with some wonderful green sea turtles, some excellent Mai Tais in Po'ipu, out door showers, beautiful gardens and natural spaces, incredible surf, and a doors-off helicopter ride that put the whole island in perspective.
Would I come back to Kauai again?
In a heartbeat.
Would that I didn't have to have a job and that I could travel anywhere when I wanted to.
Even then, I am sure I would find myself spending much time on the Hawaiian Islands.
The next post will likely be in a couple of days when I am back in Chicago. Dealing with much less hospitable weather. Until then, Aloha!
P.S. I seem to be having some email problems right at the moment, so if you left me a comment or sent me some other email to one of my keyboardbiologist.net accounts, I probably won't be able to answer until I get back to Chicago. Not sure why I am having this problem, probably some strange quirk of the internet that will repair itself when I get back into my home territory.
Yes, we did feel the earthquake this morning. It woke us up right after 7 AM with some mild shaking, though nothing strong enough to cause anything to fall off tables or shelves. Everything was relatively gentle here in Kauai, and, to my knowledge, we also never lost power.
However, Hawai'i Island (the Big Island) -- the Island that made us first fall in love with Hawaii in the first place (we went there before I started blogging) -- has had a much worse time of it. Please keep the people on that island in your thoughts today. So far no casualties have been recorded, but much damage has been done, and the residents of that island will have much to deal with in the next coming days.
At the same time, residents of O'ahu and Maui have been without power most of today. And O'ahu is dealing with the heavy rain downpour that we had on Kaua'i yesterday. A tough day on the Hawaiian Islands. I think the governor of Hawaii has declared a statewide state of emergency.
Here on Kauai, we have nothing to complain about other than grey skies (we did get some sun in the morning) and some mild afternoon rain. We're about to head to the beach to see how all the earth motion has affected the surf.
Mellow weather and geological activity to you all.
Our next adventure on Kaua'i was to head to the Limahuli Garden. This garden, like the Allerton Gardens, is a part of the National Tropical Botanical Gardens. It's located after mile marker 9 on Highway 560, the road that hugs the coast leading out from Princeville. The Limahuli Garden is located in the beautiful Limahuli Valley which used to be home to many native Hawaiians. The garden is now a focal point for preserving Kaua'i and Hawai'i's native plants.
As such, it is not really what you think of when you think of a traditional botanic garden. The focus here is not really about providing you with a stunning year round display of flowering plants, but instead to preserve and educate about the native plants of the islands. Most of these plants are not showy flowering plants, instead tending towards mostly being leafy green foliage. The garden also points out invasive species. Both of these kinds of displays are focused around educating people about the ecology and botanical diversity of the island and how to preserve it. While the garden displays are quite beautiful and the views are stunning, it has a diffierent kind of feeling than you might expect.
I did take a lot of pictures, but after taking a tour of the website for the garden, I discovered that they have a virtual version of the same self-guided tour that we took. That tour includes pictures -- good pictures. Instead of trying to repeat the excellent job that they have already done, I thought I would just provide the link to the virtual tour and encourage you all to take virtual trip through their gardens. It's not the same as physically walking the garden, but the text is exactly the same as what we received for the self-guided tour.
Of course, I do have a few pictures of my own -- these are mostly just the pictures that made me happy as we wandered through the garden and hopefully add to the flavor of the garden that you get by going through the virtual tour.. You can click here to go to the starting point in my Kaua'i gallery for the garden walk.
You might have taken note of the fact that many of my pictures have grey and overcast skies. From this, you might get the impression that Kauai is always grey and overcast. This really isn't the case. While we have been here, it has almost uniformly been beautiful and sunny in the morning moving towards cloudiness with patchy sunshine in the afternoon. John and I just don't tend to get out very early, so most of our pictures have that cloudy afternoon thing going. I think this is just part of how the Hawaiian winter shows itself on Kauai (yes, October is considered to be the start of winter here) and goes hand in hand with the beatiful heavy surf that brings the surf boards to the beaches in droves. It is still between 70 and 80 degrees and the sights are still lovely. And given the current weather in Chicago (snow, already!) it's hard to complain about a few grey skies. After all, waterfalls and lush plants both require a goodly amount of rain.
Most of there rest of our afternoon was spent at Ha'ena Beach and Ke'e Beach (the beach at the end of Highway 560 which I previously posted sunset shots from). While we had a late afternoon snack on Ha'ena Beach, I took this short movie of one of those waves that was drawing surfers out of the woodwork all around us.
No new pictures from Ke'e, unfortunately. Once again we went there to snorkel, and the camera stayed safely locked in the car.
There's just something about the place we rented for the second week of our stay. 100 Shades of Green is a two level house in the upcountry between Hanalei and Ha'ena. When we first walked into it, I got that feeling about it that just made me feel like we had come home. It's decorated with all sorts of fun objets d'art and walking through the place, you just get the sense that many happy memories have been created here. It has a good aura, if you'll forgive a little bit of new agey-ness from me.
On the seventh day of the trip, we didn't do very much. We enjoyed the house, took a trip out to see Tunnels Beach (I didn't take any photos because we were planning to snorkel and I didn't want to leave my camera unattended on the beach). Then we came home, relaxed and got ready for a relaxing dinner at a restaurant at the Princeville Hotel. We had dinner while watching the sun go down over Hanalei Bay.
A lovely way to end the day -- and dinner was quite good, too.
Princeville, however, struck us as very strange. It was as if someone had taken a gated community from an upscale Houston suburb (yes, I know what these look like, I've been to Houston a number of times) and dropped it down on a tropical cliff overlook. It just seems completely out of place in Kaua'i, an island with a very down-to-earth and natural feel. Not a place where you need to worry about feeling unsafe, or where you would want to trade the beautiful tropical landscape for golf-course manicured lawns and exactly placed palm trees. But to each their own, I guess. Clearly it is the comfort zone that a large number of people desire.
It's all about the beaches today. This was the day that John and I drove from our south side beach house at Kekaha Beach to our north side, upcountry house.
I realize now that I never showed you any pictures of the actual places we stayed. You can see Hale Moana here. Yes, it was a little decadent. Yes, we did love it. Yes, outdoor showers rock. Our north shore home away from home, 100 Shades of Green, is just as wonderful. I wish I could show you the stars from that hot tub on the deck or let you smell the ginger.
We started our drive up highway 50 to the main entry place for Kekaha Beach Park. (The link will take you to the images in my gallery). Kekaha Beach was the closest beach to us for the first week, and had beatiful golden sands and high surf. You definitely could go in, but you had to be careful with the waves and the currents.
After a brief stop at Kekaha Beach, we drove to the end of highway 50 (past the Pacific Missile Range Facility) and down several miles of bumpy dirt road to Polihale State Park (again, the link takes you to the beginning of these pictures in my gallery). Polihale Beach is on the true west side of the island and marks the start of the south end of the Na Pali coast (one of Kaua'i's most famous features). The surf here was absolutely amazing. It started out fairly sunny when we got there, but got increasingly overcast as the afternoon wore on (which seems to be the trend for Kaua'i in October). The beach was fairly empty and it definitely wasn't what I would have consdered swimmable, but it was beautiful and definitely worth the trip. And I did get a couple of videos from the beach:
Big Waves at Polihale:
Surfer at Polihale:
Kite Boarder at Polihale:
After that it was time to move our stuff from Kekaha to west of Hanalei on the north side of Kaua'i. The change in the scenery is amazing, as you move from somewhat dry and rather red to exceptionally lush and green. It's worth driving from one end of the highway to the other, just to observe the changes (and unlike the Road to Hana on Maui, the whole trip will probably take you less than 3 hours and is not that aggressive). While we waited for our new digs to become available, we headed down to Ke'e Beach (yes, the link takes you to my gallery, with a brief detour near Princeville) for the sunset. Ke'e Beach is literally as far as you can go on Highway 560, 10 miles past it's start point at Princeville. It's a beautiful beach, and you can take a swim as you watch the sun go down. And in case you wanted to know what watching the sun go down at Ke'e Beach is like, I have one last video from the day to share:
Sunset at Ke'e Beach:
(The "big bad boys" I am referring to at the end of the video are the waves... unfortunately there were no buff men on the beach besides my favorite guy...)
I had to pause a little while we travelled from the south side to the north side of the island and get settled in. There were lots of pictures from our 5th day, so I got a bit lazy about sorting through them and preparing them for the gallery. The great thing about digital cameras is that you can never really run out of film. The bad thing is that you need to spend more time selecting and processing the best images for viewing. There's something about the north side of Kauai that downshifts everything a few gears and just makes you want to take everything a little more slowly.
Our fifth day in Kauai took us back into the Waimea Canyon for some dayhiking. For this trip, we started at Hale Manu Road, just inside Koke'e State Park, walked on to the Black Pipe Trail, Canyon Trail and Cliff Trail before returning to Hale Manu Rd and our car. (You can click here if you would like to see a PDF containing a trail map for the park.) This was a nice loop, and it gave us some lovely views of the canyon, it's foliage and the Waipo'a Falls.
The day was very overcast, which will become clear in the pictures. For hiking, however, this was not necessarily a bad thing, as it kept us cooler and made the hiking more comfortable, and didn't really change the inherent beauty of the canyon.
There are so many trails and hikes that could be done in Waimea Canyon. If we had been staying on the south side of the island for our entire trip, it would have been tempting to spend most of our time there, taking in the views and watching the clouds roll in and out. It really is a remarkable and special place, I could have sat on the Canyon Trail ridge for hours just watching the view change.
There will be a few videos that I upload later, but for now, you can see the pictures we took by going to this point in my gallery.
Finally, a short video of Waimea Canyon from the Canyon Trail overlook:
Our fourth day on Kaua'i was given mostly to water sports that weren't camera friendly -- i.e. snorkeling. I don't have a waterproof camera, and even if I did, I don't have one of those cool filters that allows you to filter out the blue wavelengths. You'll just have to trust me when I say we saw some lovely fish around the Po'ipu Beach tombolo.
We did make a short excursion out to Spouting Horn -- a lava shelf over the south shore where there are blow holes. These blow holes act almost like geysers, sending fountains of water up in the air. Because these things are more impressive in moving than in still pictures, I took another video to help us capture the memory:
I also did get a few pictures of the shore line around Spouting Horn and of the Po'ipo Beach tombolo. You can find them starting at this point in my gallery.
The Hawaiian Islands are a remarkable place to grow all sorts of plants. In fact, because of the climate, it essentially is a greenhouse without the glass windows. Orchids can grow "in the wild" on trees with no additional maintenance. Flowering plants from all over the world are in great abundance. In fact, this raises something of a problem, because it is very easy to introduce non-native species whose vigorous behavior can overwhelm the native plants. The same is true of animals as well. Many of Kaua'i's animals (and this is also true of the other Hawaiian Islands) did not develop in a predator-filled environment, and thus, don't have the ability to protect themselves from introduced species.
It's one of the cool things that happens from having a blog, but my trip from Kauai inspired an email from Pauline, who is part of the Kauai Forest Bird Recovery Project where she is specifically working on helping to preserve the Puaiohi -- a bird with only 200-600 individuals left in the wild.
She wrote the following in her email to me, and I thought I would share it:
if you ever give any money towards conservation of biodiversity in the U.S., please consider supporting Hawaii (the nature conservancy does great stuff, and they're not my employer). Hawaii has something like 2/3 of the endangered species in the U.S., but gets very little money and has low visibility. The bird which I mostly focus on, the Puaiohi, has only 200-600 individuals left, but gets less than $200k in funding per year - compare that to gray wolves or whooping cranes or anything on the mainland U.S.
Even if you never contribute any money to this kind of cause (and I am not soliciting donations here) I think it's important to know about the ecological problems that face the US and other countries. While I knew Hawaii was a fragile place, I never realized how fragile some species are. It's a good reminder to treat every place you go with as much respect as possible and to do your part to take good care of the wild places that might be home to some animal that desperately needs that place to stay wild to survive.
It's probably the ultimate irony that I would talk about native species conservation in the same post as when I talk about our trip to the Allerton Gardens, which are part of the the National Tropical Botanical Gardens. It is a truly spectacular garden, but almost all of the plants are imports from other tropical locations. It was a space the transformation of which started with Queen Emma and progressed with the Allerton family (the Allertons founded the First National Bank of Chicago). So today's new gallery entries are from our guided tour of the Allerton Garden. Flowers a plenty ahead! (Apologies in advance for not remembering most of their common or scientific names... I didn't have a notepad with me to write things down with). And if you want to start at the beginning, you can enter the gallery here.
Our second day of exploring Kaua'i was spent on the north end of Waimea Canyon Road in the Koke'e State Park. Koke'e has a whole collection of wonderful trails and some beautiful views of the Kalalau Valley looking out to the Pacfic Ocean.
To see some of our images from the day, here's the link to the starting point in my Kauai photo gallery.
In addition to photos, there are also a few short videos from the day, taken after I remembered that my little camera also takes very nice movies and that I could upload them all to YouTube and not take up my own disk storage space with them.
The first movie is a short movie showing the moving clouds over the western edge of the Kalalau Valley, taken from Pu'u O Kila Overlook.
The second movie is our encounter with a Nene, a native Hawaiian goose, taken at the entrane to Koke'e State Park on our way back down from the overlook.
And, in case you were concerned, John is not feeding the goose, nor did we ever attempt to touch the animal or be aggressive towards it in any way. He simply is gesturing with some grass to get it's attention.
If you want to see these videos in the context of the rest of the day's photos, I have also linked to them, where appropriate, in my photo gallery.
And if you just want to keep track of what I am uploading at YouTube, here is a direct link to my YouTube Channel
You might think, when visiting an island, that your first adventures would involve surf and sand. Instead, we headed inland (or mauka which is toward the mountain in Hawaiian) and took a look at the Waimea Canyon. Waimea Canyon is a specatular canyon north of Kekaha were we are staying that Mark Twain once dubbed "the Grand Canyon of the Pacific" and it really is just that stunning.
This picture that I took in widescreen is one of my favorites from the day. Shrunk down to blog-acceptable size, it hardly does the scenery justice. But I hope it does convey some of the majesty of this work of nature. From what I understand, that canyon was formed by a combination of repeated volcanic eruptions and lava flows, several rivers and general water run off. At its tallest point, it's about 3-4000 feet.
What makes Kauai so truly stunning to me so far is how it is like stepping forward into geological time.
The first Hawaiian island that we visited was Hawai'i -- "the Big Island". This island is still incredibly volcanically active and still growing in size. You can see lava flows and erupting volcanos. Mauna Kea, considered dormant, is over 14,000 feet tall. The western side of the island looks almost like a lunar landscape, where the most recent flows have occured, while the eastern side of the island, which gets much more rain, is more green and lush, but still rocky and jagged.
Last year we visited Maui. Maui is just north and west of the Big Island. None of its volcanoes are considered active any more, but you can drive to the top of Haleakala and once again, you are 13-14,000 feet above sea level looking down onto a barren rocky landscape. The north side of the island is lush and green, and you see occasional places where the jagged lava rocks peek out, but mostly the north side of the island doesn't give the impression of being volcanic. The south side of the island is dry, and as you drive around the southern base of Haleakala you can see evidence of old lava flows, but you are also struck by the small plants and trees that are taking hold. Even without too much rain, biology is taking over from geology. Maui gives the impression of being more careworn than the Big Island. And this is most clearly in evidence when you drive around the mountain that is the main structure of the north western half of the island. The volcanic activity is long gone, and what you find is water and plants breaking down the rock and smoothing out and flattening the surfaces.
Looking at Kaua'i is like fast-forwarding into time again (John and I haven't been to O'ahu, but I suspect if we did go, we would see another intermediate phase in geological evolution). Kaua'i has long since been separated from the hot spot in the floor of the Pacific Ocean that resulted in this incredible island chain. There are no 14,000 foot peaks on Kaua'i. While it is warmer on the south and western portions of the island, the entire place is surprisingly green and rich, hard volcanic edges softened by time. Kaua'i is firmly in the process of being reclaimed by the ocean that it arose from.
After going up Waimea Canyon Road to the Waimea Canyon Lookout, we drove back down the road to the Kukui Trail. The Kukui Trail descends down into the canyon and allows you to see the changes that occur, both geologically and botanically as you go lower into the canyon. It's something of a challenging hike because the elevation changes pretty dramatically in only a mile or so, but we loved the changing views of the canyon and the vegetation. We only went about a mile along the trail because it was late afternoon when we started, and we didn't want to do the return trip in the dark.
I've loaded the day's best pictures into my Kaua'i Gallery. If you've already looked at the first couple of pictures, then you can go here to get to the start of the pictures for today.
I'll be back as soon as time permits. I have more pictures from our trip up the northern part of Waimea Canyon Road, as well as some video. I do so very much love my little camera!
Well, after a few weather related issues that I will blog about at some other time, John and I are happily in Kauai. We are staying in a lovely rental home across the street from Kekaha Beach Park. Where in the world is that? Perhaps a little map image would help...
(Yes, I did just figure out how to include a Google Map on my blog just for this occasion. Why do you ask?
Our first day on the island was fairly uneventful. It included the usual shopping for things we forgot, grocery shopping and trying to find a place to have dinner. Not so many pictures yet, but I did get a gallery started. You can find my Kauai photo gallery here. I'm not as happy as I would like to be with the photo quality -- I think it's because I saved them at 72 dpi. I'll leave them at higher resolution tomorrow and see if that comes out better. I thought the gallery might make it easier for those of you who want to avoid large page loads to do so, at the same time as it makes it easier for me to upload and display a larger number of pictures from our trip. Please feel free to comment or otherwise entertain yourselves with the gallery. It will get much more entertaining soon. Unfortunately, my blogging time is being cut into by the need to finish up a work project. And the sooner I finish that project up, the sooner I can be to the business of some hard core vacationing!
