1. Snorkeling. The video above is at Anini beach, which isn't the best snorkeling location, but we got lucky and ran into 3 giant sea turtles! It was pretty insane how they were just there, like they live there or something. Hawaii is a crazy place. Later, we did an early morning snorkeling trip to Tunnels beach. There were huge schools of fish swimming around and feeding, so we just swam along with them and they didn't seem to mind.
2. Waterfalls. Our first stop was Wailua Falls. There was a lookout point and a small trail down to the falls our travel guide book said "only for the sure-footed". We took this to mean "anyone without elderly companions or small children" and started down the trail. Turns out it was kind of tricky and it was a lot like the Illahee "trail", but we slid down the muddy slope to reach the falls. There was one other adventurous couple that hiked down to the falls. Little did we know just how adventurous they were....as soon as we reached the bottom, they went skinny dipping right in front of us! I think we have a few pictures of us by the waterfall where we accidentally got them in the distant background.
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| No skinny dippers in the background |
Secret Falls was fun too, we kayaked up the river, hiked through the jungle, waded through another river, tried to lure a chicken across said river with graham crackers (unsuccessfully), hiked some more...and reached Secret Falls! The water was pretty darn cold in the swimming hole here, but it was still awesome.
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| Secret Falls |
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| This hurt a little bit. |
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3. Driving around. We took many many scenic drives (aka ...any drive) and saw all around the island.
4. Sunrises and sunsets. Since it goes completely dark around 6pm, that's pretty much when we fell asleep every night, so it was fairly easy to get up really early to see the sunrises. Sunsets were beautiful and lit up the whole sky.
5. Beaches. Of course! To mention just a couple....
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Glass Beach was a black sand beach with tons of smooth glass chunks
Polihale was my favorite beach, it was enormous and we almost had it all to ourselves.
Shipwreck beach was very rocky and very cool looking.6. The resort. Our last few nights, we stayed at a resort which was amazing. We spend a lot of time playing water volleyball, riding on inflatable turtles, going down intense water slides, refusing alcoholic drinks, watching music/dance performers, making other guests jealous from the scent of our hot pockets heating up in the microwave (this is real), and sunbathing under a palm tree.
7. The Kauai Sands Hotel.
A close second to the resort, the kauai sands hotel was quite the place! It was the cheapest place on the island and full of retired vacationers. It was actually a little bit unsettling walking around the hotel- we were literally the only people there under 60. It was awesome though, we were still on the beach.
8. The food! Okay so we didn't get too adventurous with food. Everything was really expensive so we mostly survived off of hot pockets, pot pies, and copious amounts of oreos (best splurge ever!). We did however enjoy a couple delicious teriyaki burgers grilled in roadside trailers. One night we went to a really cool Hawaiian tiki restaurant and got "Hula Pie". I think we were expecting something a little more exotic than a slab of mint ice cream with some coconut on top....but hey it was still tasty!
9. Feeding chickens and birds.
10. The plane ride! ....not....
I wanna snorkel so bad.
ReplyDeleteI wanna go to to Kauai! Orson, you definitley need to snorkel!
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