Aloha! The Next Day

Today we went to Waimea Canyon, on the west coast of the island. You drive and drive a curvy road up, up, up, stopping at various scenic overlooks along the way, where you run into a couple from the east coast who at first strike you as friendly and helpful until you realize the man lacks the ability to read social cues, such as clear body language that says oh god please stop talking and more obvious cues like "gee we don't want to keep you from your very last day in Kauai!" then finally just walk back to the car while he's still talking forcing you to avoid them the rest of the day--but then! you make a little movie:



Okay, keep driving up and up then voila! You're there at the main overlook with a thousand senior citizens pouring out of their tour buses, but what an incredible view:



Then we bought some yummy snacks: dried bananas and dried sweet potatoes, both drenched in honey--so, so sweet and strangely addictive. But then! Keep going up an alternately well-paved and hideously potholed road and you're practically on the north cost of the island, the Na Pali coast. My pictures did not come out well but you can see much better ones here. Note we only saw a slice of this from the last overlook at the end of Waimea Canyon but it really does look like that--incredibly jagged lush green spires, the bluest of waters. Oh, and lots of dragonflies the size of Mini Coopers buzzing around. Totally stunning--everyone stops talking when they take in the view, it's that amazing. We're considering the helicopter tour--it's spendy and what if I ail? Still, seems a better choice for me than a boat.

We stopped a bunch on the way back, Hanapepe, a cool little artist's town, where we decide to go back on gallery night, Glass Beach which is oddly situated behind a dumping station and what look like gas refineries, a bit of a weird slightly creepy vibe here but pretty cool, another local poke dive where I had my first taste of lau lau: a giant chunk of fatty ass pork cooked in taro leaves. Yum. Liz ordered and ate more ahi poke which while tasty, was not as good as yesterday's, and salmon lomi lomi, which sort of seemed like ceviche. Then Salt Pond Beach, where I finally got in the water. Though this is one of the calmer beaches, I would have no problem drowning here. They are really not kidding when they say to be careful in the water. Later, we stopped at a fahncy hotel in Poipu for a drink:



And a walk on Shipwreck Beach with freaking huge waves pummeling the crap out of some intrepid souls surfing there.

Then ... we went to Wal-Mart. Lizh and I are already planning our reparations for this trip, since we both swore off of Wal-Mart a while back (if you've not seen this, it's high time), but my sister assured me this was the best place to get coffee. You can buy poi there and lau lau and there's like 3 aisles of flip flops, which makes it much more interesting than any other Wal Mart I've ever been to, but still.

And somehow I'm sunburned, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that I only put on sunscreen in the middle of the day because it was cloudy before that! And raining! And Professional Critic learns a painful lesson about how harmful UV rays are present even when the sun isn't shining.