Our tour of Kauai began at Hanalei National Wildlife Reserve. The picture reinforces the name the Garden Island.
Our next stop was a challenge. The trail was very hard to locate. We arrived at the small parking spot and got one of the few spaces available. There were no trespassing signs everywhere. We finally found a local who gave us directions to find the trail. We thought we had followed the directions, but were corrected by a nice person who asked why were were walking on a private road.
He gave us more thorough directions that got us to the trail. It is a very narrow right of way for hiking over private property. To get to the beach, we had to open a gate to get to the trail.
It was worth the time it took to locate the trail. We arrived at high tide. The water was all the way up under the trees along the beach. This hike showed us our first glimpse of the variety of beaches on Kauai.
Our next stop was Hanalei Beach. It looked much more like the stereotypical large sand beach with large surf.
Anini Beach looked like Hanalei Beach but had lots fewer people .
Kauapea (Secret) Beach was the most unique beach we saw today. That was because it is a challenging hike to the beach. You can see from the first picture that it is quite a hike down to the beach. The second picture shows that you are walking through deep woods on the way to the beach. After all that hike, it was one of the largest beaches we saw today. Just across the bay from the large beach are the cliffs of the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge.
Secret Beach also had some of the biggest surf we saw today. Along with the large waves, the water was multi colored because of the depth changes.
Our next stop was planned to be just a lighthouse. It turned out that the lighthouse was part of the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge.
In addition to a lighthouse, we got to see a wide variety of birds and plants, and some very rocky coastline.
There was plenty of rocky coast line that justified the building of a lighthouse. We also got a different view of Secret Beach from the lighthouse.
The Wildlife Preserve had hundreds of birds. They seemed to know that they were safe here. This is a long distance shot across the bay to a large nesting area for some of the birds.
Here is one zoom into a single bird in the nesting area, and three photographs of the Nene, Hawaii’s state bird.
Our last beach of the day was Kealia Beach. It was not even on our schedule, but when we saw it we knew we wanted to stop for a little while. We ate our lunch here.
The final stop for the day was Ho’opi’i Fall trail. It was a place full of surprises. It was a nice hike along a very nice creek. While we were there, we learned that there were two waterfalls rather than the one we were expecting.
The first waterfall was a very nice fall over a rocky area. Today, it was several small falls in a single place. As we prepared to leave, someone there asked if we had seen the “other falls”. We said no and asked for directions. We were told about the main falls. People say the main falls were used to film a Harrison Ford movie. A big scene in the movie is a jump into the water below the falls.
Now, many people a day duplicate the jump into the water. We saw several people make the jump. One person even did it as a back flip. Research to verify the jump claim did not pan out! The third photo below is taken from the rock where the jumps were made today.
Here is a selection of the flowers and animals that we saw today.
Today was a wonderful tour of the diversity of things to be seen on Kauai.