low_delta: (delight)
I just did a search, for the first time, of "secret tunnels kauai" to see what info is out there about my hike, that wasn't covered in the guidebook. I was amazed to learn that there is a series of at least five tunnels that lead all the way to the north shore! Wow!

According to this account, it sounds like each tunnel gets more difficult.
The tunnels are about 6 feet wide and roughly 7-10 feet high with a more than occasional need for a head duck and there are several tunnels each with their own unique flavor. One was blocked off with rocks but passable. Most had ankle high water running through them. One was waist deep. Another had ankle high mud for 2 miles. And yet another filled with knee deep mud in one section. We found and traveled four. There were more ahead of us too. Each tunnel opened up into a new and beautiful site as it neared us closer to the mouth of the Hanalei River on the North Shore. When we finally hit the 5th tunnel and realized it required crawling on our bellies we decided we had enough adventure for one day.
This site has a slightly more detailed account of a trek, and they have some good pictures. There are sixteen in a gallery behind the link in the upper right of the page.

Maybe I will go back up there. I could have Cyn pick me up at the other end of the trail. Or plan on making it an overnight, in case it's impassable... :-)
low_delta: (stonehenge)



Nearby is the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge, home to a diverse population of nesting seabirds. You can see some white specks in the air around the peninsula, which are the birds.



Probably the last pictures from the trip that I'll be posting. I hope you enjoyed them.

Poipu

Mar. 19th, 2007 11:16 pm
low_delta: (stonehenge)
We went to the beach one day.


Everyone asks why I didn't come home with a tan. That's because (1) I don't really tan, (2) I have to slather on the sunscreen and (3) we only did the beach once, for a few hours. As nice as that was, I can only sit still for so long, when there's so much else to see. Next time, maybe...

a few more )
low_delta: (Default)
Here is a collection of miscellaneous pictures we took on the island.


Some roadside scenery.

see more )
low_delta: (Default)

The Royal Hawaiian Hotel
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Ivy's Place.


Living room and dining room shown here, along with part of the lanai. It also had a full kitchen, two bedrooms, and a large bathroom (shower only). A garage, laundry, beach chairs and towels, an attached studio apartment (for which we paid another ten dollars to have no neighbors there).

+9 )
low_delta: (stonehenge)

You can see Cyn in this picture. She's sitting near the ridgetop, just to the left of the little peak in the center. If you lean close to your monitor, you can see one white pixel. that's her. I think she has her head down. Probably looking at pictures on her camera.

+15 )
low_delta: (faerie)
This was an amazing place. Just about the only way to see it is by air or by boat. We chose air. Next time, we'll take the boat. I didn't get very many pictures that show it well.



five more )
low_delta: (Default)
On Monday morning, bright and early (like, 8:30), we drove up the road to Ke'e Beach. It's at the end of the road, on the northwest end of Kaua'i. The day before, we had taken our helicopter ride, which is when I took this photo.


Ke'e beach is right at the bottom of the picture. You can see the road winding through the trees at the base of the cliffs. Our pilot called it "the land of no parking spaces." There were only about four cars in the lot when we got there. We walked around the point to Ha'ena beach, which is in the cove. Then we walked the road back. As you can see, the beaches are ringed with reefs. They say it's great snorkeling in the summer when the ocean is calm. That's a really big reef (obviously) out from the point on the far side of the cove. The point in the distance is Princeville, and the point in the haze beyond that is Kilauea (pictures of that tomorrow). You can see two little points sticking out into the bay this side of Princeville. Just this side of the nearer one is where the road headed up into the valley where our cottage was. The second is the near side of Hanalei Bay (the other side of which is Princeville). So there you have it. Now back to our walk...

Read more... )
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There's a hill on the east side of the island that's called Sleeping Giant, because it vaguely resembles a reclining person. It's somewhat isolated from the rest of the mountains, so you can get a good view of the entire eastern part of the island. One fifth of the entire island, I'd say. I guess Nou'nou was the Hawaiian's name for the hill. We took the Nou'nou East trail. I think it was the shortest and steepest of the three trails there.

 1.

+10, not too exciting )
low_delta: (nothing)
Two weeks ago, we took a helicopter tour on Kaua'i. Last thursday, there was a fatal crash there. The pilot was a Vietnam vet, been flying choppers since the war (at least), logged 5 years in that particluar model... Four people dead, three critically injured (including the pilot). Crashes happen on the island, almost every year, apparently. But like airline crashes, you don't let it bother you too much, because of the number of flights they do.

There was another fatal crash this sunday. One dead, two critically injured. This time it was the same company we flew, and the same model of aircraft. The article didn't release the pilot's name, so I wonder if it was our pilot. I believe they only had two choppers, but I'm not sure how many pilots they have.

http://www.thehawaiichannel.com/news/11226790/detail.html?subid=22100441&qs=1;bp=t

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6600AP_HI_Helicopter_Crash.html?source=rss

dreaming

Mar. 11th, 2007 10:53 am
low_delta: (faerie)
So far, since I've been back, every dream I've remembered except one has been set on the island. A generic representation of it, anyway. And I've been remembering my dreams a lot this week. This means I've been waking up slowly in the middle of them a lot. There's one thing that's happened quite a bit. I wake up a little bit, trying to figure out where I am. My first thought is that I'm at a tunnel. There's a bluish spot of light (the clock radio) and a big rectangular outline next to it, that reminds me of a tunnel entrance. This is the edge of the window shade. So I sit or lie there trying to figure out where I am. This has happened at least three times.

I had deja vu last week. It was while we were in a tunnel. I usually get that feeling when important things or big changes are happening.
low_delta: (Default)
The first thing we did on our first full day on the island was take a helicopter ride. They say you really should take one on Kaua'i, and they're right. There is so much amazing scenery there.

The first part of the ride was in Waimea Canyon. They call it the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. All of these pictures are from there, but only some are from the air.  We saw it twice from the ground. There is one main canyon that runs south towards Waimea, and quite a few tributary canyons that come down from the rainy mouintain top. So there's a road that runs along the west rim of the canyon opposite all the feeder canyons, and that's where the rest of the pictures were taken. Some pics were mine on the big camera, and some were Cyn's from the little one. All of the ones showing the inside of the helicopter were hers, but some of the others were also hers.

 1.
This is in the lower part of the canyon, where it's greener.

These pictures are in more-or-less numerical order, which isn't very helpful to you. There are twenty-six images in this post, each a little over 110 Kb, so if you're on dial up, you might want to get another cup of coffee or something.

Read more... )
low_delta: (stonehenge)
While I was doing this...


Cyn was doing this...

the tunnels

Mar. 8th, 2007 10:39 pm
low_delta: (stonehenge)
Back in the early part of the last centry, someone decided they needed a little more water in their valley for sugar cane production. So they dug a couple of tunnels through some mountain ridges. After they were abandoned, few people knew about them except for a few hunters following pig trails on the state land up in the hills. The guy who wrote the Ultimate Kaua'i Guidebook learned of them a few years ago and put them in his book. Upon reading about them, I decided I had to go.



The book had them in the "Adventures" section, rather than "Hikes," so that was my first clue to the difficulty. Then I read closely, trying to picture what was between the lines, and decided I could handle it. I was right, but...
Okay, this gets long. It took me a couple of hours just to write it. You don't have to read it, but there are pictures. While I hope it's an entertaining read, the main thing is for me to get it down for my memory.
it really was an adventure )

traveling

Mar. 4th, 2007 10:52 pm
low_delta: (Default)
We flew American Airlines. Actually, we also flew American Eagle out of Milwaukee. They were the ones who scheduled their pilot with the absolute minimum number of hours downtime between our flight and her previous one. So when it was an hour late getting in, ours had to be an hour late getting out. We were a little worried that our two hour layover wasn't going to be enough, but it was. We got off the plane, jogged up to our gate, and they had just started boarding. We stood there for ten minutes waiting for our turn.

After we touched down in L.A., the plane sat in an alley waiting for a gate to open up. We were a little more worried, because we only had forty-five minutes between flights. We were there for half an hour, so when we disembarked, we jogged up to our gate and got right on the plane.

Other than that, the flights were pretty uneventful. Saw Mt. Wilson from above (which we saw up close, last trip). The sunset lasted a really long time over the ocean, since we were flying into it. It was just dark in Honolulu. After those short layovers, our luggage still made it to the carousel before we did. We were impressed. Not so impressed with the events that made that an impressive feat, though.

We learned that American does direct flights to Kaua'i. That would have been good to know. Would have gained us a day on the island, not having to jump between Oahu and Kaua'i. I had planned on doing a little bit of sightseeing there, but it turned out we did very little. Saw Waikiki beach, and that was about it.

I was surprised at the size of the plane running between the islands. They do a $39 flight every hour, so I figured it was a little commuter plane, but it sat six across. About 120 people. They served guava juice on that flight.

The return flights were less eventful. We left just after sunset, and arrived in St. Louis about an hour before sunset. A six hour flight, IIRC. Couldn't sleep much. The flight was rough the whole way. Just like a bumpy road. No big potholes, just an uneven surface. When I tried to sleep, I kept dreaming I was in a car. I kept waking up because in my dream, the car would be going up and down hills and around curves. But then the plane would not be, so the discrepancy woke me up. We sat up front under the screen where they were showing Rocky Balboa. The bright flashing lights didn't help me to sleep either. Between all that and the rough ride, I didn't get much more than an hour of light, interrupted sleep. We had two hours from St. Louis to Milwaukee. It was bright and sunny, but I slept a lot better on that one.

Panoramic

Mar. 4th, 2007 10:46 pm
low_delta: (Default)
Here's a panoramic I stitched together. This is Waimea Canyon.

cut for your protection )
low_delta: (worried)
I'm a bit disappointed about the some things we didn't get to do. We didn't take a boat tour. We didn't see any whales or sea turtles. We didn't see the National Tropical Botanical Gardens. I didn't see the Alakai Swamp. Didn't see Pearl Harbor. Probably a few other things I'm forgetting just now.

I'm getting nervous about my pictures from my new camera. First of all, they all turned out underexposed. I had a polarizer on it, but the camera checks exposure through the lens, so it should compensate. It had a lot of trouble focusing in dim light, which I blame on the polarizer. I'm pretty sure I only used it on my telephoto lens, and but all my shots seem to be bad. I don't recall having any trouble with the handful of pics I took before the trip.

The second problem is that I can't yet view the pics I took in RAW. My friend gave me a link to the Adobe site for free downloads, but I first have to upgrade Photoshop. So I've got a couple hundred pics I won't even be able to see for a couple of days.

It's frustrating because these pictures are my memories. I remember the last day pretty well (so far), but anything earlier in the week, I need the pics. The underexposed pics are not going to be great pictures. They'll be fine for showing people what we saw, but I intended to come away with a few spectacular shots.
low_delta: (Default)


We took about 700 pictures for the week. I hope to fix up a good number of them, and I'd also like to post about the trip in detail, but I only have today and tomorrow before I have to go back to work, and I'm tired. So here's one for now.

This is Hanalei Bay, on the north side of the island. We stayed in a cottage a couple of miles past the bay. We saw this on our way to dinner. The restaurant was a little bit down the road, and when we got there, we discovered we had the same view of the sunset, though it had faded a bit by the time we were seated. The restaurant was an expensive place in a resort. It was open-air, and had a beautiful view of the bay.

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