Kauai

Napali Coast

I am going to try to write a series of posts about the recent trip I took to Kauai as an exercise in documenting my travels and my musings. For this post I want to try and focus on sharing an itinerary and some cool pictures.

One of the nice things of living on the west coast is the abundance of flights to Asia and the pacific. I was lucky to find round trip tickets from Los Angeles to Lihue, Kauai for ~400 a person!

As soon as I walked through the airplane doors and into Lihue International Airport (LIH) I was hit by a thick humid air and couldn’t help but feel nostalgic about my trips to India. The airport is small and unassuming compared to LAX and I kept looking around to see if I could spot any customs agents. See on the plane I had asked to fill out a plant and animals declaration form and I had packed raspberries and blackberries so I was worried I would have to surrender my snacks, but to my delight no one said a thing and we sailed through the airport terminal to the rental car shuttle pick up area.

The Airbnb I had booked was at the Club Wyndham Ka Eo Kai in Princeville which is a ~40-60 minute drive from the airport depending on the time of day. On the drive to the hotel I could already see more stars than I had almost ever on the mainland so I was already over the moon.

The room had a hot-plate, coffee maker, microwave, bed, and toilet. I could have lived there for years.

The next few days were a whirlwind of adventure, sightseeing, and reflection. The first stop was

The Helicopter

So helicopters are kind of crazy right? Leonardo da Vinci proposed the idea for the arial screw way back in the 1400s and now we can fly around in these bad boys.

Helicopter

The helicopter experience over the island was one of the highlights of this trip. Since Kauai is mostly inaccessible by land and is almost entirely privately owned seeing it by air is one of the best ways to get a feel for the island. The awesome pilot (Preston) did a great job making us (me) feel safe. It was my first time on a helicopter and it’s difficult to find the words to describe exactly how surreal the landscape looked from above so I won’t try.

Food

I love food. I think I love food more than most non-foods. The food was just okay though. Kauai is many things, but for a (mostly) vegetarian person the food there isn’t anything to write home about. That being said please enjoy some of the better food I ate (and drank).

Lord Shiva

It’s true you really can find God everywhere, and everywhere includes Kauai! Walking around the Kaduval Hindu Temple grounds is a grounding experience. While I am not a particularly religious person, I was proud that my heritage made it all the way to one of the most remote corners of the world. The temple complex is massive and worth exploring because it is undeniably beautiful.

Waterfalling for you.

There’s not much to say here except that this hike was tough with a bum knee but I made it and I swam around under a waterfall and that is cool 😎.

Me under a waterfall

Beaches be crazy

There were so many beaches on the island I felt surrounded. Some beaches were better for just looking at, others for swimming in, but all incredible.

Dogs are mans best friend but Princess is mine

The Kauai Human Society runs a wonderful field trip program where people can take shelter dogs out for a day out on the island. The goal as I understand it is to socialize the doggos and get them time out of the shelter and potentially get them adopted to the mainland (the humane society helps cover some of the transport costs as of the writing of this post). We were able to spend a day with Princess and she truly is a princess. It breaks my heart that I couldn’t take her home with me, and that the sad reality is that she is still probably in that shelter.

Princess the Doggo

Roads not taken

I have recently started a self-hosting mission to reduce my dependence on software I don’t control and to improve privacy. One of the services I now use is the Dawarich project which intends to be a drop in open source replacement for Google Timelines. I plan to write more about self hosting in the coming weeks & months so stay tuned and subscribe to the RSS feed at the top of this page 🚀.

All of that was a long way of saying: check out my cool map of the trip.

A map of my time on Kauai

Ramblings

This section is mostly things that I have thought about and haven’t had the time/patience to write full length publish-able posts about. If you want to talk to me about these things I would love that.

• One of the largest industries on the island is coffee. I love coffee but what the hell? How did we get here?

• Most of the island is actually privately owned and I learned from multiple sources that the family that bought this (and other) islands paid practically nothing for them. In a future post I plan to explore the ethics of mass landownership.

• How in the world did people get here? I cut a large part of this post that had to do with exploring the Polynesian adventure into the Pacific islands but plan to re-visit this topic. There is some incredible history and work done within the last century to explore how humans braved the open oceans (see Kon-Tiki 1 & 2).

• Kauai had perfect weather during my trip. I can’t imagine the island as a literal hellscape of volcanic ash and lava pouring into the frigid depths of the Pacific Ocean but that’s exactly what happened. To me there is something poetic about that.

• The history of Hawaii and the United States is insane and I learned none of it when I was in school. I want to learn more about it and post about it soon. If anyone can’t wait for the next installment just read the Wikipedia history section for Kauai.

• I met many interesting people on the island. For me meeting strangers and sightseeing are equally important aspects of travel and I wonder if it is the same for others?