Our Hawaiian Adventure: The West Shore

I enjoyed all of our days in Kauai, but if I had to pick a favorite I think this would be my favorite day.

We left Poipu pretty early to head to the West Shore which was about an hour away. Once on the West Shore, we headed to Waimea Canyon with the plans to do a hike. We have both been to the Grand Canyon so decided not to hike in the canyon but to instead hike on one of the trails that leads to a water lookout.

We ended up at the Awa'Awapuhi which is about 6 miles round trip. Thanks to one of the guidebooks that was in our room (another plus to our rental- there were tons of different guidebooks available) we had no trouble finding the trail.

We set out this hike which was somewhat like the Grand Canyon in that the hike out was downhill, but the way back up was up hill. We were expecting this to be a pretty easy hike for us, and it was... until about one mile into it.

JP has an ankle injury that keeps bothering him. He tweaked it before the trip while mowing the lawn. After just a mile of hiking, his ankle was preventing him from hiking well. He was limping and I was in the lead which rarely happens. He did not want to turn around though. Thankfully we ran into some Hawaiian natives that were placing walking sticks along the trail. JP picked one up and it became very helpful to him.

We continued the hike which had a few sneak peeks of the sights to come at the end.

Once we reached the end it was such a beautiful view. Of all the hikes I have done, this has been the best end view.

After we finally made it back to car (it took us about 3 1/2 hours), we headed back down the canyon. We did stop at an overlook to see the canyon.

Our zipline tour guide had recommend Ishihara Market to us when JP had asked for the place to get poke (raw fish). We decided to check it out for lunch.

We got four types of poke. I'm not a huge fan of poke but had some plus some fruit. Afterwards we headed to JoJo's Shave Ice (I learned it is shave ice, not shaved ice). I got the lychee flavor. JP got one of their specialty ices. Either he did not read the description well or they gave him the wrong one, but his had beans in it which made us laugh. They looked like kidney beans, but I did some research and they are azuki beans.

At that point it was time for us to head towards our boat tour of the Na Pali coast. I did a ton of research on which boat tour to take and finally decided on using Kauai Explorer. At first all I kind find were companies that used either a large catamaran or a small raft like boat (inflatable zodiac). The large catamaran was too big to go into sea caves, which is something I really wanted to do. But, the small raft boats, although they could go into sea caves, looked really uncomfortable as you had to hold on to a rope the entire time.

Finally I came across Na Pali Experience which uses mid-size catamarans that are small enough to go into caves but large enough for comfort. Plus, they only take 6 people on the boats so it feels like a personal tour.

We were incredibly pleased with Na Pali Experience and even more pleased with the beauty of the Na Pali coast. This is on several lists of must sees throughout the world. It truly is awe inspiring and causes you to want to do nothing but praise our mighty, creative God!

 

 

My absolute favorite part of the tour was going exploring sea caves. Our tour went farther down the coast of any of the other tours- we saw many turning around- and we got to go in two caves that no other tours visit.

 

We ended the boat tour right at sunset and headed back to our rental. We were both pretty tired and ate our leftover from Casa di Amici from Friday night.