Saturday, January 9, Kauai — Today was a wonderful day of a red and green layered gorge and    

 rushing waterfalls. Tammie drove me over to the west side of the island and we stopped at three waterfalls. The first, Opaeka’a (Opika), is a double falls that’s about 150 feet high, with the Makaleha Mountains in the background.  The next one we went to was Wailua Falls, also in Kihue, another double waterfall, this one about 170 feet high. It crashes into a deep turquoise pool. The story is that in ancient times Hawaiian men would jump from the top to prove their manhood.    

Our third stop was Kipu Falls (in Lihue), a wonderful spot on a former sugar plantation. You have to walk through a narrow trail with leaves and 10-foot underbrush crowding all around, but well worth it! It’s a short walk that opens onto the river with cascades of water burbling over the rocks and then crashes down over a semicircle walled cliff. It’s only about 20 feet tall, but all the more unique because you can crawl out (carefully!) onto the rocks and get right to the edge of

 the falls. You can also climb into some fabulous trees ringing the falls and pond and get over the falls that way.    

On to the west side of Kauai and to Waimea Canyon — the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. It’s even red like the Grand Canyon, but from lava beds, not clay and other minerals. Waimea means red water in Hawaiian. It’s a mile wide, 12 miles long, and about 3500 feet deep; all carved from floods and rivers that flow from  Mount Waialeale (the wettest spot on Earth…literally…getting more than 460 inches of rain per year!). There are wild goats that wander the canyon; we heard one but couldn’t see it. The temperature was about 10-15 degrees colder at the base.