We flew to Kaui early in the morning, from the tiny Kona airport (it’s cute, everything is outside. Not sure what they do in a storm…).
We flew over Waikiki, and if you really look carefully, you can see where we stayed there and the Diamond Head volcano!. We landed in the island of Kaui, AKA - the garden island. Geologically, it is the oldest of the islands in the archipelago, at about 2 millions years: since then, the tectonic plates have slowly but surely moved it away from the hot spot that has created all the volcanoes (and thus all the islands), so that it has had plenty of time to transform the lava into red sand, and the landscape into a tropical explosion of green. (Interesting side note: a new island is being formed as we speak, and will in time replace the Big Island as the newest on in the archipelago, but it still needs to grow about 13,000 feet before breaking the surface of the pacific).
We drove along the coast first to a waterfall, and an overlook: this is the only navigable river in all of Hawaii. It is 15 miles long and a favorite of kayakers. It starts in the central mountain, which is the wettest place on earth- it rains up to 600 inches/year, which, among other things, ensure that the water fall is always flowing.
We stopped for lunch at an old sugar plantation (all commercial sugar production stopped in the 1990’s), where the old mansion is now a restaurant.
We started with MaiTai’s - it was only 11:00am, but - they still extract their own sugar cane juice and make their own rum - so it would have been rude not to!.
They still indeed grown sugar cane, but only for local rum and restaurant production. They even still have the donkeys that were so important to the trade. They are quite well…… endowed?
Lunch was accompanied with local music and hula dancing, and I embarrassed myself by learning a few hula moves…. My hips just don’t move that way…..
We next headed to the National Botanical Garden, where we had a great tour of the gardens (first owned by queen Emma, and then purchased by one of the sugar magnates.
It shows a lot of the original gardens, and beautiful water features, but its aim is really to preserve local plants and provide an environment for critically endangered local birds- this is one of them (Gallinula) - All of the birds I’ve shown so far, while interesting, have been brought to the island from Asia at some point.
That includes the chicken - which are EVERYWHERE! The pretty Asian painted ones were already all around when a big hurricane hit in 1992, destroying most of the domestic chicken coops. Since then, they have cross bred with the Asian one and feral chicken are everywhere you look. Some are very pretty!
In the botanical garden, they also had this pair of Muscovy ducks - one of which was brought here as a gif 9 years ago, the other one just showed up 2 years ago, so they just kept it. He follows the tourists, hoping for crumbs….
The gardens are very lush, even though they are in the “rain shadow” of the mountain - meaning it doesn’t rain much there. But there is so much rain in the mountain that irrigation is very easy, thus the many water features, including my favorite,- this reflective pool.
Of course my favorite part was the huge banyan trees! They were planted in 1950 and are just magnificent. I also love the little gecko at the top of the blog…. And this one too…..
On the way back, we got a good look at the valley where the gardens are,
and the stopped by a blow hole by the ocean just at the bottom of the cliff. The sea is rough on this side of the island - so the blow hole blows quite consistently.
At last, we made it to our hotel, by the ocean in Koloa. It is very pretty and we will have more time to explore tomorrow. We had drinks and a lovely dinner at the terrace restaurant.
And here are a few more pictures of the garden (I particularly liked that bamboo trail).
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