Kauai 1: Waimea Canyon, "The Grand Canyon of the Pacific"

My friend Dallan Quass said that Kaua'i was his favorite place on Earth that he had ever visited. It is the "garden island" of Hawai'i, and has less touristy activities and more lush scenery than some of the other islands. I always wanted to go there, so when we discovered some $296 flights from Salt Lake City, we didn't hesitate to book them.

Jared heard about the trip and asked if he, Adam and Sienna could come. We said that if they bought their own flights, that they could join us. So they did, and on August 24, 2021, Andrew was kind enough to take us to the airport at 5am to begin our trip.

Here's the traditional "Here we go!" picture.

We got to our gate with no problem, and then fell over for a moment to wait for our flight to L.A.

In L.A., we got some Dunkin' Donuts to tide us over. Sienna and I both happened to wear our Australia shirts that day, which has little to do with Hawaii except that they both are surrounded by oceans.

Our flight wasn't especially full, and Linette and I found that we had an entire row to ourselves. (Too bad we didn't have that on the overnight flight on the way home!)

We all uploaded our COVID vaccine cards in advance, so getting past the airport checkpoint in Kaua'i was no problem.

One thing I had been concerned about was the rental car situation. During COVID, Hawaii sent its rental cars to the mainland, since nobody was allowed to visit the islands at first. But once the islands opened back up, the rental car companies found that they couldn't buy new cars to replace the ones they had sold off (due to the computer chip shortage), so Hawaii still had a severe shortage of cars. Our flight got moved 8 hours earlier, and I couldn't bump our car reservation up online, so I was worried we would be stranded.

As it turned out, they had plenty of cars on hand, and we were able to upgrade to a minivan (with plenty of room for our luggage) and get the extra half-day for barely any more, so that was great.

We dropped by Wal-Mart for a couple things, and Sienna climbed a tree.

Then we grabbed lunch at "Smiley's", a local "food grind" that had some decent kalua pig and Korean "kalbi" ribs (which means "ribs ribs"). Also, Kaua'i has many, many chickens roaming wild, both in town and throughout the wilderness.

Jared and I really thought this tree was cool. It turns out, Kaua'i is covered in cool trees.

We ate at a nearby park (surrounded by chickens).

Our AirBnB was a condo on the east side of the island (in Kapa'a) that overlooked the ocean. The view from the Lanai (back balcony) was gorgeous.

The east side of the island is where most of the people live. The south side is dry with touristy beaches. The north side is wet, green and lush. The west side is a beautiful but has a steep series of cliffs with no road.

We had no plans for that first day (since we originally weren't supposed to be there until 9 pm), so I went for a walk to explore the area.

There were coconut groves planted by a German fellow in the 1890s with coconuts from Samoa. What the fellow didn't know was how long it would take before they grew enough to be profitable.

Our condo didn't have any sand right in front of it (due to storms washing it away some years ago). Instead, it had huge sandbags to protect the remaining land. But there were beaches starting next door, so we enjoyed walking along those, although the swimming and snorkeling wasn't great in that area.

There were resorts of various sorts all along the shore, some with tiki torches and live music going on.

I came across the ruins of a Heiau, which is an ancient Hawaiian temple. These sites are still considered sacred by some Hawaiians.

We had a Safeway right across the street from us, so Linette drove down and picked me up at the Coconut Marketplace, where my walk had taken me, and we all went shopping.

I was unreasonably tickled by my discovery of the "buy 2, get 4 free" deal going on with the otherwise expensive boxes of cereal. Everyone thought I was crazy when I first suggested that I was going to buy 6 boxes of cereal, but I thought it would be crazy not to buy them. We finished almost all of it off by the end of the week. (The Chocolate Toast Crunch wasn't quite worth finishing...)

Wednesday morning, August 25, 2021, Linette and I both woke up around 5 a.m. (=9 a.m. Utah time) and went for a walk on the beach.

It sprinkled a little while we were out, which ended up creating a rainbow over the place where we were staying.

Somewhere in this picture is a little tiny crab that was really fast. (It's just to the left of the toe prints).

Here's a close-up I was able to get of it before it zoomed off again.

Our main activity for that day was to drive down to Waimea on the southwest shore, and spend the entire day exploring Waimea Canyon, which has been described as "The Grand Canyon of the Pacific". (This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, but he never actually visited Kaua'i).

We loved how green everything was along the drive down.

Here's a little time-lapse video of driving down the green road:

Once up Waimea Canyon, we stopped at each lookout, and were never disappointed we did.

We thought the river running through this canyon was beautiful, but "we ain't seen nothing yet."

There was a cute farm down in the valley floor.

The next turnoff surprised us with a very curious hill of smooth red dirt.

There was a little creek running through it, but it somehow didn't erode the area as much as I would have expected.

We eventually entered Koke'e state park. (By the way, when you see an apostrophe in a Hawaiian word, do a glottal stop/new syllable, like "ko-keh, eh").

There was an overlook that had a spectacular view of "The Grand Canyon of the Pacific".

Here's Sienna with a waterfall you can just barely see in the distance.

Let me zoom in on that waterfall for you.

Here you can see Waipo'o Falls, which cascades some 800 feet down. We later hiked over to the top of those falls along the Canyon Trail.

Linette and I wore matching Captain America T-shirts that day.

Next we decided to hike down the Canyon Trail, which was almost 2 miles each way. It was a fairly steep downhill walk for most of the way, and we were pretty sure we knew what that meant for the hike back.

The hike was gorgeous, though, with deep shady jungle for most of the way.

Sometimes the kids did a "T-pose." I'm not sure what was up with that.

We saw a couple mountain goats across the way as we hiked along.

The trail was an interesting mix of jungle in some spots, and red rock views in others.

Every few minutes, a helicopter would fly over, giving some tourists a view of the valley and the waterfalls.

Eventually, we reached the end of the trail, and found the top of the waterfall there.

There was a little 20-foot-tall cascade we could look at.

But the only way to get any sort of a view of the 400-foot section of the waterfall below us was to climb out onto this one rock that jutted out. My body tingled the whole time that Jared was out there, because it was 400 feet straight down from there. (I'm not afraid of heights--I'm afraid of my children on heights.)

In this picture, you can just barely see the water go over a big drop to the first pool below.

From where we were, we could see way down into the canyon, and it was strange seeing birds soaring "way up in the sky", and yet be looking way down on them.

After spending a half an hour at the falls, we started the uphill hike back to the road.

Adam hadn't been terribly active lately, so he struggled with the hike. 

"When was the last time you went outside?" Linette asked him. 

"I drive to the store sometimes," he said.

But he made it!

This tree had really soft squishy bark, kind of like a sponge.

We didn't take quite enough water with us on the hike, so we were glad that a nearby picnic spot had a drinking fountain where we could restock. Even peanut butter sandwiches taste amazing after hiking.

After lunch, we continued driving up the canyon. At one point, Jared said, "Woah! I just saw a HUGE golf ball!" We suspected he had become unhinged.

But then we pulled into the parking lot at the Kalalau Lookout, and sure enough--huge golf ball.

(Apparently this is a radome [="radar" + protective geodesic "dome"] operated by the Hawaiian Air National Guard, perhaps to avoid another Pearl Harbor).

Kaua'i has a lot of pretty flowers. I thought Sienna went well with this particular scene.

Some of the trees have dramatic above-ground roots.

When we got to the railing of the Kalalau overlook, we were amazed by the view of the ribbed mountains of the Na Pali coast.

And then, as if it weren't amazing enough, a rainbow appeared along one side.

I had read that if you go down a little path (just beyond where it says "Path closed") that you get an even better view. So we started down a very overgrown path, but soon turned back when it became fairly unpassable.

Then we realized that wasn't the path, so we started down the real one, which was much better.

Along the way, we kept getting new views of the valley, and the rainbow kept coming and going.

Finally we found this one point that had a spectacular view of the valley on all sides. It also had steep drop-offs all around, so we were careful about every step we took down there.

It was the best view we had seen since Machu Picchu.

Down the right side, the cliffs converged into a single hole.

Down the left side were some interesting narrow ribs of mountain jutting up.

We kept staring at the view for some time, enjoying the magic of the rainbow and the changing light as the clouds shifted.

Then we had to hike back up the steep path.

As we hiked back up, we kept seeing the valley from new angles.

The far cliffs were 4000 feet tall. Way down near the bottom are 3 waterfalls, each about 400 feet tall. The following Monday, we would hike the two miles up from the beach to the lower fall and swim under it.

Later we drove up to one final lookout, the Pu'u O Kila Lookout, and were rewarded with a great rainbow there, too (for the price of just a little rain as we walked up there).

This lookout had yet another angle on the valley.

That was as far as the road went, so at that point, we headed back down the canyon. We pulled over at one vista that didn't have a great turn-out, so we had missed it on the way up. The sunset colors lit up the red rocks beautifully.

The waterfall there was the one we had hiked to the top of. It was nice to get a look from where you could actually see them.

While we were standing at the above vista, a white Mustang slowed down to see what we were all looking at, so I motioned with my arms as if to say, "Presenting...the view!" and then the Mustang continued on its way.

After we got back in the car, we saw that the sun was about to set, but there were too many trees and hills in the way to see it, so we hurried down the canyon to find somewhere that we could see it. At one point, we came upon that same white Mustang, and the sun was exploding in glory right there. The guy in the Mustang motioned with his arms as if to say, "Presenting...the sunset!" We all cracked up at that.

We didn't stop right then, but soon realized we didn't have anywhere else to see it, so we went back up to one place where we could catch a glimpse, and were rewarded with a nice sunset show.

Living in the Salt Lake Valley, most sunrises and sunsets are blocked by the mountains, so we tended to get especially excited about these events on Kauai.

With that, we hopped back in the van and went in search of food.

We ended up going to "Da Pizza Place".

They had cool trees there.

After a very long day of driving and hiking, everything tasted amazing.

"Mahalo" is the word for "thanks" in Hawaiian, so it was cute that it said that on the garbage.

When we got back to the condo, Sienna fell over on the couch and was immediately out. It was only 8:30 pm, but it had been a long day, and that was 12:30am Utah time.

We were all a little surprised how wiped out we were after just one full day there. One down, seven to go! o.O

In the next episode, we kayak up the Wailua River and hike to Secret Falls.

(As always, you can click "Newer Post" to go to the next episode)