Notes from Our Vacation - Nawiliwili, Kauai

Our arrival at the gorgeous island of Kauai proved beyond any doubt that it was indeed the rainy season in Hawaii ... rain, driven by high winds, was so heavy we couldn't see across the pier from the ship to the passenger terminal. We had booked a special tropical flower and waterfall tour, but when we swam out to the terminal to meet the bus, we learned that our tour (and many others) had been cancelled because of flash flooding across the island. Aaarrrggghhh!!!

Well, we were in Hawaii and didn't feel like sitting on board the ship, so we caught a ride to the local Hop-On-Hop-Off bus, bought tickets for the day, and set out on our own.

We hopped off first at Lydgate Beach Park. There certainly wasn't any swimming to be done (as you can imagine from looking at the surf in the pictures below), but it was a beautiful place nevertheless ...

While at the park, we made the acquaintance of many of the local inhabitants ...

The island is overrun with feral chickens - our bus driver said there were about 700,000 of them, although I'm not sure how anyone could come up with a number more accurate than "bazillions." There are apparently no significant numbers of predators to keep them under control*.

We were starting to despair of visiting any of the tropical gardens we'd wanted to see, because the bus operator's radio kept crackling with a litany of all the locations that were closed because of flooding, but we lucked out when one of the sites decided to open just as we were driving by ...

The area was well-saturated and we spent a few hours avoiding huge puddles while gawking at the glorious tropical scenery. In this picture, you can see the local feature known as the "Sleeping Giant" - the mountain line on the horizon looks like the profile of a sleeping man lying on his back ...

Of course, we did the usual touristy thing of trading cameras with other visitors to get pictures of both of us together ...

The gardens were full of tropical birds who flocked happily around all visitors ... they long ago learned that people buy bags of seeds at the entrance and are good for a snack. Agnes had a large following that included one of the many peacocks, as well as ducks and the usual chickens ...

The smaller birds will happily eat from your hand. Some less-wary visitors tried to get the peacocks to eat from their hands ... which they will do, but the result can be painful when the larger beaks meet the smaller and softer hands!

We made a stop for a late lunch at Gaylord's Restaurant at the Kilohana Plantation. The location was gorgeous, the service mind-numbingly slow ("island time," dontcha know), and the food fantastic. I had delicious chicken crepes and Agnes had a caprese salad and fish tacos. This was my salad - Ahi Poke, a wonderful tuna ceviche with plantain chips served in a coconut shell on a bed of salt ...

By the time we were done with lunch, it was time to head back to the ship ... although we seriously considered just staying in Nawiliwili, rain and all. The day ended with a spectacular sunset ...

And we sailed majestically on to our next stop, which we will visit tomorrow.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* We learned on some of the other islands that the inhabitants had imported mongooses (mongeese?) to help control the rats that had arrived on ships. It didn't work - the mongooses are active during the day and the rats came out mostly at night, so they never tended to meet up. Now they have problems with both mongooses and rats.