We’ve been heading to Starbucks most mornings, drinking our morning coffee there, and checking up on our emails, updating this journal, trying to straighten out Chris’s school stuff, making our reservations for our next stops, and occasionally responding to emails. Our reasoning for this is because we wanted to avoid the morning traffic before heading out to some of our destinations that are in or around Honolulu.
We left Starbucks this morning at around 9, and headed off to hike the Diamond Head Crater. We got to the parking lot at about 9:45, and it was full. We could wait in a line of other cars waiting for someone to leave…but we decided we’d just adjust our plans and come back to do Diamond Head later.
We headed to the Lyon Arboretum, which is a rainforest and botanical garden that is maintained by the University of Hawaii. It was so incredibly beautiful. We hiked through tropical gardens up to a fall. We were the only ones on the trail, and we got to enjoy the fall all by ourselves for a bit before heading back down for lunch. We ate lunch in the beautiful gardens, and then headed down to Manoa Falls.
We had done Manoa Falls back in ’07, and it’s literally right down the mountain from the Arboretum, which we hadn’t done before (and would highly recommend to anyone!). The trail was amazingly different than it was in ’07. Half of this is because of the weather…previously we went in September, and with the winter rains, the trail was a lot wetter, which just made it look a lot different. The plants were greener too. There was a large tree that we had taken a picture in front of in ’07, and this time around there was a HUGE fallen tree that laid in the way of that tree. They chain-sawed the tree so you could still walk in the path. The fall was still just as beautiful as we remembered. There’s still rocks falling from the top of the fall down, so you can’t get too close to the base of the fall, but it’s still serene to sit there and admire.
After we were done here, we attempted to head back to Diamond Head to hike. They’re doing maintenance on the trail, so it’s only opened till noon right now, so they were closed by the time we got there.
Instead, we headed off to see our blow hole that Steph had taken us to back in ’07. They’ve made a big stop out of it now, so there were lots of people down there. There’s a little beach to the side of the blowhole that you can climb down the rocks to get to. It’s more of a little cove. In ’07, we were the only two down here. This time around, the place was packed. We saw whales breaching at the blow hole out in the ocean, and saw a sea turtle feeding on the algae on the rocks. It was so cool.
Because the blow hole beach was crowded, we headed down the road and found another bigger beach to relax on for a little over an hour before heading back home for the evening. The beaches here are so beautiful! We drove home on the Windward side and were taken aback again with the beauty of the rainforest over here. I didn’t take any pictures though…you drive on a bridge and through a tunnel before coming out on another bridge and then the highway. My fear of silly bridges kept me from having Chris pull over so I could get the camera out of the trunk, but the beautiful scenery will forever be etched in my mind!
No comments:
Post a Comment