Kauai: Stuff To Do

Kauai was much less crowded than Maui, and generally less developed from a tourism standpoint. I liked that about it. Beaches are plentiful all over the island, and they are only crowded around the resort area of Poipu. We spent a lot of our leisure time at sparsely populated beaches on the north end of the island. That meant driving, but the driving is better than on Maui, and the North half of the island is incredibly beautiful. This blog covers some of the activities to do on the island besides lying around on the beach and eating.

 Beaches are all over the place, but there's much more to do on Kauai than walk in the sand.

Kipu Ranch ATV Tour 
 

Maree stands under Mt. Haupu near an area featured in Jurrassic Park.

Our ATV tour was more entertaining than I had imagined it would be. We decided on an outfit called Kipu Ranch Adventures. Our guides were great guys, very friendly and knowledgeable, and funny without being cheesy. They worked hard, kinda, and seemed to enjoy their job. The tour is all within the boundaries of a huge 3,000 acre ranch, and visits numerous Hollywood movie sites. It also offered a view into a hidden, privately owned valley that is not visible from any public roads. It was given by the King of the island to a family of ranchers for a period of seven generations. That time period has nearly expired, and the fate of the valley in uncertain at this point.

From a pass near the top of Mt. Haupu we were able to see the private, hidden valley of Kipu Kai, where they filmed much of Six Days and Seven Nights. 

 On the way back down the mountain, this part was on a thinly paved road.

You can choose to ride a typical ATV or ride one of those two person vehicles. I chose the latter, because i'd never driven an ATV with a steering wheel and wanted to try that out. I had also hoped that maybe Maree could drive some times so i could take pictures, but they only let one person drive, and it was WAY to dusty to pull my camera out while riding. Sometimes visibility was close to zero during the faster moving sections. They warn you to wear clothes that you can throw away and they weren't kidding. The volcanic red dust didn't wash out. I was glad i brought my camera in a waterproof bag.

 This is part of the hill in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark, where Indy gets chased by natives in the first scene in the movie.

 

   

                   Above: After our tour we were pretty filthy.

Left: The tree where Indiana swung from a vine into the water is still there, and now it's a rope swing! More on swimming holes below. 

Our guides told us this is how they season their pigs, with flavored soda. Like chickens, feral pigs are all over the island. With fish, pigs, and chickens running rampant, it would not be easy to survive here.

Hiking and Swimming

The ocean was pretty rough while we were there, as it typically is in winter, so we stuck with land activities for much of the time. Maui offers virtually no hiking at all, except in the National Park, and there are few trails even there, except at 13,000 ft. Kauai has lots of trails, and has some of the best scenery in the world to hike through. I had 4 or 5 hikes in mind, but only managed three. Two hikes were along the Na Pali Coast, but i'll get to those in the next blog post.

Part of the trail along the irrigation ditch. Nearby the ditch goes into a low 800 foot tunnel that you can walk through, bent over, if you desire.

 In the distance is the mountain where the wettest spot on earth is supposed to be. It's normally covered in waterfalls. Our helicopter tour took us back there.

We did another short hike to a freshwater jungle swimming hole. Getting to the trail head in our crappy PT Cruiser was more of a challenge than the actual hike, and i ended up getting a flat tire. I didn't notice the tire until 6 hours later, but still, it's pretty pitiful since the road wasn't what i would consider a bad road.

The swimming hole. There's a concrete damn up there, and the irrigation ditch comes out of the tunnel on the left, then continues to a lock system off to the right. The water was incredibly cold, and a strong current would initially pull you quickly towards the little falls, then spit you out to the side.

The road that the Cruiser couldn't handle. On the way back we picked up a Canadian hiker and gave him a lift back to his car, about 4 miles down the road. He had just finished working on the Olympic preparations in Vancouver, and had decided to get out of town once the  Winter Olympics officially began. He was  a nice guy.

Another option for swimming. On the north end of the island are some large, ominous sea caves. Now after many years of changing tides and currents the caves are inland. Some are dry but this one was filled with deep fresh water. A sign claimed you would die from a cave in if you tried swimming.

Helicopter Touring

The helicopter, tour was a much better value for our money than the one we had on Maui. The helicopter will take you around the entire island, over and through remote canyons, past endless waterfalls, and along the entire Na Pali Coast. It was the most scenic flight tour i've ever been on (other than the Ruth Gorge in the Alaska Range), even though it was raining for much of the tour. This time our helicopter was smaller than the one we had on Maui, and it had doors on it. The windows go all the way down the side, offering great visibility, but as i feared, the reflections on the glass were out of control, even with a polarizer. And I had to bribe someone to get a front seat.

This is an area of immense scale, one of the most sacred sites to Hawaiians, where water gushes out from a huge overhang beneath immense cliffs on the wettest part of the island. It was dark back here.

Turning around from the waterfalls you can see the deep narrow valley we were flying through. This was my favorite part of the air tour. 

We flew up a long steamy looking jungle valley. The rain may have made this portion of the flight more interesting.

 I think this was over the Kipu Ranch area.

The National Botanical Gardens

We weren't originally going to go to the Botanical Gardens on the south side of the island (not the gardens to the North), but on our last day we had to burn up 7 hours after we checked out of our hotel before we could get on our plane. I didn't want to get dirty doing something like hiking or swimming, so we went to the gardens.  I can't say i recommend the place. It's divided into two areas. A "good" area that costs $40 to get into, and a mediocre area, which still costs $20. Additionally you can't just drive up and walk in. There is no parking in the garden, and the 15 minute shuttle ride only goes in and out once every hour. I've been to several other botanical gardens that are of better quality and much cheaper to get into, and compared to the plants you can see everywhere else on the island, it's just not worth the money.

 

 This was one of the prettier areas.

There's an area of the gardens that you also have to pay extra for for and be driven too, where there is a grove of very large versions of this kind of tree.

Next Time: The Na Pali Coast

Kauai

Kauai is the smallest and oldest of the 4 large Hawaiian islands. It also claims to be home to the wettest spot on earth, some areas that get an average yearly rainfall of nearly 39 feet. Kauai's age, combined with the rain, results in an island that has been heavily eroded over time. In sharp contrast to Maui and the Big Island, the volcano that created Kauai has been carved into an ornate, cliff ringed plateau rising abruptly 5,200 feet over the surrounding landscape. Deep canyons run off the mountain, carving cliffs c into fantastic shapes littered with high waterfalls that evoke a lost, primitive world. It's no surprise that over 70 movies and shows have used the island as a backdrop.

The north end of the island looks like Cambodia, but instead of rice they are growing Taro.

Another result of all the rain is that Kauai has rivers. No other Hawaiian island has rivers. But to say it is so rainy is misleading. Like many of the islands, most of the rain falls on one side. As the trade winds smack right into the Na Pali coast, the air is forced straight up the mountainside, and through adiabatic cooling produces rain at the top. The southern portions of the island are much drier, often enough to expect sunshine every day.

In sharp contrast to the north, the south end of the island looks semi-arid.

Waimea Canyon on a cloudy, rainy day.

Waimea Canyon on a sunny day.

 

Waimea Canyon at dawn. Are you getting it yet?

My first night on Kauai I discovered that it is a cursed island. In 1992 Typhoon Iniki did a substantial amount of damage to the island. The entire ecosystem of the island was changed when a chicken farm was destroyed, releasing all the birds into the wild. There are no predators on the island, and as a result the whole place has become overrun.

We had flown in late and didn't check into our hotel until 11pm. At 3am I woke up to roosters crowing. It was so loud it sounded like it was right outside my window. It went on until I got up later that morning. The first thing I did was go outside to see how far off these roosters were. They were directly outside my window. Additionally, they were on the porch, on the walkway to the car, all over the parking lot, in fact, there were roosters and chickens all over every surface of the ground in all directions. They were actively reproducing. To kill a few was pointless. I thought I would go crazy.

It was enough to make me completely re-prioritize my vacation. We spent the morning finding a new hotel to stay in, being sure to not only look at the rooms but also to walk all over the grounds and count chickens. Before noon we found a nice resort that was almost chicken free. I found out at night that they had large feral cats that helped take care of the chickens in the area.

The lithified cliffs near Poipu are a fun walk offering tidal pools, hidden surfer caves, and a secluded beach at the end of the cliffs.

This tidal pool had a lot fish and sea cucumber to mess with.

On one occasion, Maree and I were eating some sandwiches at a community park, in a covered picnic area to stay out of the sun on a hot day. There were some tennis courts and ball fields around us before the park stopped at the edge of the jungle. We were the only people there, but in no time at all chickens and roosters began to emerge out of the thick trees and walk towards us, slowly, like zombies. Some of them would try to half fly over the fences, others took their time and walked around the long way. Withing minutes there were two dozen chickens and roosters at our feet, milling about and eyeballing our sandwiches. Maree began to get nervous, the roosters began to compete for position, and still more chickens streamed out of the jungle. It was such a crazy experience I deemed Kauai the victim of a Zombie Chicken Apocalypse. I dove at them and they scattered like frightened lunatics.

Locals encourage you to kill the chickens at your leisure. I set about the task wholeheartedly, but they seem to have adapted to constant attempts on their lives and have become quite skittish. Even running over them can be challenging. I did manage to smash into one with the corner of my car, on the last day we were there. It squawked, and in my mirror I saw it tumble of into space like Darth Vader's damaged tie fighter. 

A close up view of a Taro field. 

This bridge was really fun to drive over.