Kauai

Just one more beautiful island! Kauai is relatively small and seems to be a condensed version of the other 3. We have visited before and spent significant time exploring, including part of the Napali Coast Trail in the rain and Waimea Canyon in the fog—both still beautiful, in spite of the weather. So this time we focused on the south shore and, in particular,  the McBryde and Allerton Gardens, which are part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. As the name implies, the gardens contain plants from the tropics—not just Hawaiian, but worldwide.

Picture 1 shows that we appreciated more than the gardens and the southern coastline of Hawaii is as rocky and beautiful as those on the other islands. Like the other islands, Picture 2 shows the blow hole.

Within the gardens, the plants are amazing and our guide excellent (you can visit the McBryde gardens on your own, but the Allerton Gardens require a guide). The Allerton Gardens we started by a pair of brothers with a substantial amount of discretionary funds, who enjoyed creating “rooms” in their huge private garden. Their gardens were willed to the government under 2 conditions: that they remain in a relatively natural state (nothing is closely pruned) and dead plants are replaced by the same type of plant.

The gardens are lovely and a little wild looking, since they’re not pruned. Because of this several movies and TV programs have been produced here: Jurassic Park, Gilligan’s Island, Lost and Pirates of the Caribbean, for example. Morton Bay Trees from Australia are shown in picture 3. A dinosaur egg was found between the roots of the second tree in Jurassic Park.

The remaining pictures were interesting plants we found. Orchids growing wild:

A corpse plant. Once this plant reaches 16 feet in 12-14 years a single, beautiful flower emerges that smells like a corpse.

Vanilla beans. This vine grows up the side of a tree. Those are vanilla bean pods growing on the right side.

Dutchman’s Pipe. This is a large flower, about 12 inches from top to bottom and everyone thinks it looks like meat—I didn’t get that!

We’ve been at sea for 4 days since leaving Hawaii, heading almost straight south to Tahiti. Today we crossed the equator at 10:24 AM. For more cocktail party trivia, the circumference of the earth at LAT 0° 0’ 0” is 24, 905 miles and the diameter is 7927 miles. We had our King Neptune celebration yesterday afternoon, dunked a few pollywogs (1^st timers from the crew) and toasted the good King—anything to bring out a little champagne!

We’ve had wonderful lectures. Paul Eschenfelder is a pilot, sailor, consultant to governments and worldwide traveler and has lectured on Polynesia. Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman is an astronaut, who logged over 1000 hours of flight time aboard the Space Shuttle, has been telling us about life as an astronaut and teaching us about the Hubble Telescope. Hugh Thompson is a British movie producer and has shared several of his films involving travels to really unusual places. It has been such a treat to hear from these men.

Two more days at sea and then Tahiti, Moorea and Bora Bora.