[Kauai TR] Day 6: A Morning in Waimea Canyon

There are lots of pictures from this morning in the gallery.

At the Lu’au, the previous evening, Mark and I got a tip that the place to go on the island for boogy boarding was a beach far out west. According to our maps, it was about as far west as you could possibly go on our little island. So, on Saturday, we decided to head in that direction. Check out Mark with the shibby rental car during our morning drive on the sunny southern shore…

By 9am or so, we were driving through the nice little town of Waimea, where the road forks. On one side, the road branches north into a famously beautiful canyon. On the other side was our beach. We decided to take a couple of hours and drive up into the Waimea canyon for a bit of a look around.

The canyon was AMAZING. In the course of less than 20 miles or so, the road wound from the ocean’s edge to over 4000ft above sea level. Everywhere we stopped we saw amazing, green, lush, cliffs and beautiful steep valleys. Many of the Jurrasic Park movies were filmed on this island, and it really felt like I was walking through some kind of paleolithic rainforest at times.

The road winds along the rim of the canyon, and at the end of the road is an overlook and many trails winding along the north shore of the island, also known as the Nepali Coast. This region of ultra-steep and ultra-green rainforested cliff lines are so incredibly beautiful that they just don’t seem real. It feels like you’re standing on top of a movie set!

Some day I want to go back and backpack through this canyon. It is such an amazing place, I’ve never seen anything like it. But on this day of our vacation, we were hungry for lunch and some boogy boarding so we decided to head back down to Waimea for the next leg of our adventure.