My Life Blog

Its Saturday and I’m just back from 8 days in Kauai. It is very difficult to describe in words how beautiful and how spectacular the sights there are. In fact, its even difficult to capture the vibrant and variety of color there through amateur photography, but you can see my feeble attempt here (Kauai Photos). Be warned, however, that there are 133 photos, so it may take a while for the thumbnails to fill in depending upon the speed of your connection. Also, I’m going to title and caption them as time allows — for now, they are raw.

I don’t know really how to begin. If you don’t know a thing about Kauai, you should picture a very lush island (it hosts the wettest place on earth toward its mountainous center) with many beaches and spectacular mountains. It even has a canyon (Waimea Canyon)which rivals the Grand Canyon in its majesty. And along its north-side, is the Na Pali coast which has 3000 ft sheer cliffs leading down into the bluest water (view from our helicopter tour).

All along the roadsides were seemingly wild flowers that we would all painstaking cultivate if back on the mainland. They were red, purple, lavender, yellow, etc (one example). And of course, everything was green and very lush.

Suzanne and I were lucky enough to book our flight on American AAdvantage miles, so the airfare cost us $30 combined. You can’t beat that. Then we decided we didn’t want to have the resort experience, so we seeked out the bed and breakfast or private condo accommodations. By the way, the resort experience would have been quite limited as this island is not overrun with tourists. There are few resort options available and it looked like that was actually the very worst choice for experiencing the island.

We stayed at the Wailua Bay condos on the East side of the island for the first three nights. We had a spectacular ocean-side view out of our balcony. And obviously, the roar of the ocean was ever-present while we were in our place.

We stayed the next five nights on the North side of the island near Hanalei Bay. We hit the jackpot with this well-kept secret of a place. This place was nestled into a valley between a small mountain and the beginning of the Na Pali coast. Outside our windows were breathtaking views — check out this picture and this picture. The place was a newly-refurbished, single bedroom two-story house, though we only had access to the second story. Its notable features were its hardwood floors and its wrap-around linai (deck) which were perfect for a glass of wine and great conversation.

Aside from the places that we stayed, we engaged ourselves in quite a few activities — some I’m not free to talk about in this forum. But I can tell you that we sampled many of the beaches. You may be thinking to yourself that a beach is a beach, but this is truly not the case in Kauai. Each appear to have their signature characteristics and some are even so hard to find that you could choose to know the few people on the beach if you were so-inclined. Among the beaches that we went to were Lydgate State Park Beach on the East side, Tunnels Beach, Ke’e Beach, and Hideways Beach. And that’s only to name a few.

In addition, Suzanne surprised me with a romantic beach-side dinner for two on a perfect night. The meal was served with champagne and our own private waiter by torch-lite. We had curiously purple dinner rolls that were fabulous.

One of the more thrilling adventures was our helicopter tour of the island. And of course, there is an interesting story here. We had planned in advance which helicopter tour company we would use and which day we would go. My thought process was to pay extra for the most highly-recommended tour company in our guide book. And we were rewarded with a spectacular aerial view of portions of the Na Pali Coast and the Waimea Canyon. The tour was very smooth and I never had any fears.

However, the next day we were getting groceries and happened to read the headlines of the paper that were to the effect of “‘Copter crashed into Mountain.” At first, I passed it by, but then I decided I need to read the story, so we bought the paper. As it turns out, another tour company had gone up and crashed the day before our tour — killing all five aboard. This really made us think. We had not heard about this previously and so it had no effect as we fearlessly went up on our own tour. I’m still not sure what I would have done if I had had the information. But anyway, it caused a bit of doubt with my parents as they tell me they were Googling for details after they read a brief synopsis about the crash.

I see that I’ve gone on and on once again here. Suffice it to say that Kauai is highly recommended by us and that we’ll definitely be back. Its probably the best vacation I’ve been on period.