My sister was up around 4 this morning, to marvel at the very black night sky and brilliant stars, but I slept in until 6 am. That’s early for a vacation wake-up call, and it wasn’t even 8 am when we started our day of sightseeing around West Kauai, the area we’d grown up in.
From the Cottages, we took the back road through Kekaha up to Waimea Canyon and stopped at the first lookout. Don’t you think the Canyon is as spectacular as the tourist brochures promise!
We continued on to the Koke’e Museum where we found a large trail map posted outside. We decided to hike the Water Tank Trail, hoping that the indications it was well-maintained might be true. Here are some photos of tropical flowers and trees, which I won’t attempt to identify for you. I believe the bright red flower is in the genus Passiflora.
On our way back down the mountain, we saw a sign for the YWCA’s Camp Sloggett, so we walked to the entrance where I took this photo of their peace pole. All of us went to summer camp here when we were children.
When we tried to get a view of the Kalalau Valley, it was so foggy that we didn’t even bother getting out of the car. However, we drank in the views at the Puu Hinahina Lookout.
These are my best shots of the Canyon from this vantage point:
Back in Waimea, we parked across from the Community Hall, where we all went to Japanese Language School. The gold trees were in bloom, and in the distance, we could see the spire of the Waimea Foreign Church. I don’t know the scientific name for the tree; it’s possiblyTabebuia donnell-smithii in the family Bignoniaceae, native to Mexico and Central America.
After refreshing ourselves with shave ice at Jojo’s we proceeded on to the Waimea River Mouth, where there is a small park. Young paddlers were practicing short sprints.
The River now carries a lot of silt down from the mountains and is very shallow at its mouth. I found it hard to imagine Waimea as a bustling port city in the nineteenth century, but a booklet we bought at the Koke’e Museum was very informative on the town’s early history. The East Side of the Island, where the county seat, Lihue, is now located, only began to be developed as the West Side’s commercial boom was subsiding.