Saying Good-bye to the Garden Island, Kauai

Friday dawned, and our week on Kauai was coming to an end. Friday was one of those difficult vacation days. We had to be out of our condo by 11:00 am, but our flight was not leaving until 10:00 pm, a red eye back to Seattle. We would have our luggage with us and not really be able to change clothes easily to prepare for our flight. How could we make the best of this final day?

Of course the other challenge was our expensive rental car. If we returned it by 3:00 pm, it would save us paying for another day. However, we would then not have a means of transportation. We didn’t look forward to the prospect of sitting in the airport for six hours waiting for our evening flight. Reluctantly we paid to have the car for another day even though it would only be for about six hours.

Fortunately my daughter managed to find some things for us to do so we actually had a busy day. Our first stop was a visit to a cave. The cave was back near the area where we had walked along the coast on Sunday. The Makauwahi Cave Reserve has a large sinkhole that leads into the cave. It’s not the easiest place to find. We drove near it and parked on an unpaved road. The trail to the Reserve was not well marked, but we eventually came to the sinkhole and could look down into it.

Now we had to figure out how to get inside. It turns out the only way to do that was to pretty much crawl on hands and knees through a very low tunnel. There was a rug on the ground to sort of soften the experience. The biggest threat was standing up on the other side. Both my wife and I hit our heads standing up too soon.

There is a volunteer docent inside the sinkhole who is happy to give you all the scientific and geological information that one might want. Visitors can only go a little ways into the cave, and of course it gets dark as one goes deeper. It’s interesting being inside the sinkhole as it’s a small garden with this huge wall surrounding it, a unique environment.

One of the aspects of the study of the sinkhole is to try to understand what the island was like before civilization came, that means even the Pacific Islanders. As part of that study, there is an area near the sinkhole that is raising large tortoises which prefer non-native plants to the native plants. This allows the plants considered native to the area to thrive there.

From there we walked down to the beach, another beach with a lot of volcanic rock next to the sand. It was a pretty quiet beach with not many people there on a Friday. I spent quite a bit of time here working on my wave photography. I was trying to get the timing right on when waves would break and create an interesting surf line. Some shots were more successful than others.

From the beach we hiked up to nearby cliffs. Here again were the jagged volcanic rocks along the edge similar to the ones we had seen on Sunday. The nice thing was that the mountains were not as foggy so pictures of them were clearer than on our Sunday visit.

From the reserve we drove over to a blowhole. Spouting Horn Park is actually the first location on the Koloa Heritage Trail which we walked part of on Sunday. The blowhole creates a fountain of water when waves come in under the rock and force the water up through a hole in the volcanic rock. There is a fence to keep people back from the blowhole. There’s no particular timing to the experience nor how tall the water goes. It’s all dependent on the waves that come in.

From the blowhole we continued along the coast to the Kauai Coffee Plantation which we had visited on Monday. My wife wanted to buy more coffee. This time we also took the opportunity to do a self-guided tour of the plantation near the shop. This allowed us to go through the coffee plants and see some of the equipment and learn the process of growing coffee. It was interesting to read about it on the posted signs, but it would have been more interesting to see some of the work or machinery in action as well as see more coffee beans. We did enjoy some of the hibiscus bushes planted around the area.

We had one more stop on this part of Kauai, the town of Hanapepe. The town has a well known swinging pedestrian bridge that crosses the Hanapepe River. The original bridge was built in 1911. That bridge was badly damaged in 1992 by Hurricane Iniki, and so the bridge was rebuilt. The bridge is narrow and the boards along the floor are not always as even as one might like, but it is a fun way to get across the river.

We had hoped that the town itself would be more interesting to walk around, but it was pretty dead. There were a few shops selling art, and apparently they have had an Art Night every Friday night. Unfortunately COVID put a stop to that so even though we were visiting on a Friday, it was pretty quiet. Hopefully the Art Night will be able to return soon.

At this point in our day, we were starting to get hungry. We decided to head back towards where we had been staying to get some dinner at a restaurant we had eaten at before and enjoyed. After dinner we walked over to get a final scoop of shaved ice.

With some time left before we needed to go to the airport, we decided to walk a little farther on the trail that started near our condo. We had only walked on it so far so we drove farther up the highway to Kealia Beach and parked there. From there we walked farther along the trail. We enjoyed our evening walk beside the coastline. It was a pleasant evening, and the sky showed a little bit of color as the sun was setting. It was a fitting way to end our stay In Kauai.

Since it was now getting dark, we finally headed to the airport. When we arrived at the rental car return, we found it jam-packed with cars. It was kind of crazy. The Kauai airport was undergoing some kind of remodeling so it was a bit crazy as well, and a little hard to figure out. We finally made it through security and onto our plane. After flying overnight to Seattle, we said good-bye to our daughter in the airport as she was flying home to San Jose.

I enjoyed our Kauai experience. There were a lot of fun and interesting things to see and do. The weather was nice if a little rainy at times. However, the temperature never really got that hot to become uncomfortable. It did seem that the COVID pandemic has taken its toll on the island. We saw a lot of empty store fronts and closed businesses. Our hope is that as the pandemic subsides that Kauai will gain back its tourist economic base and thrive in the future.

So did we miss anything important when we visited Kauai? Let us know what you saw that visitors should check out. Your thoughts are always welcome in the comment section below. Don’t forget to subscribe as well if you haven’t already. It’s easy to do and gets you a weekly email of the latest post.