Our Grand Finale: Kauai
A stopover on the island of Kauai on our way home from New Zealand at pretty much the same cost in flights? You don’t have to ask me twice. And so we found ourselves back in Hawaii for the second time in our lives, something I would never have predicted during our first visit. Back when we visited Oahu, the Big Island and Maui on our honeymoon, Hawaii was pretty much the most exotic place we had ever been. We spent much of our honeymoon soaking in the differences. Now, as the grand finale to our trip around the world and the first time we were back in the United States in over a year, we couldn’t help but notice the similarities. We were bombarded with signs we were back in the United States right away: things like refillable Cokes, free ice water, incessant news coverage, BBQ, and a whole aisle dedicated to just cereal. The signs continued: warning signs at every overlook, a plethora of channels but nothing on t.v., bumper to bumper traffic, chain restaurants galore, big enormous vehicles, and a big ole’ WalMart (albeit with chickens in the parking lot).
What epitomized the differences between the United States and some of the places we visited was our scuba diving experience. Although we had gone as far as to get our advanced scuba certification, we felt like we hadn’t really experienced a great dive due to poor weather conditions and the general distractions of diving as part of a course. Pounding rain storms and flooding threatened our chances at a good dive in Kauai, but we managed to sneak awesome two dives in close to shore. Kauai isn’t known for its diving like the Big Island, but we thought our dives were pretty fantastic. Swimming in between narrow caverns along side giant sea turtles ranks as one of our favorite experiences from our whole trip. Aside from raving over our turtle friends, we couldn’t get over the difference between diving in Thailand and Malaysia on the one hand and Hawaii on the other. First of all, the cost of just two dives was half the cost of our whole certification course! But you get what you pay for – our equipment was all set up nicely for us on the dock, right next to the boat. We didn’t have to climb through five other dive boats to get to ours, or carry our own equipment on a mile long walk, or wade through swelling waves to climb on the boat. Everything was cleaned for us and our instructors spent time going over safety tips in advance of our trip. Our instructors seemed amazed that we were advanced certified divers but had only been on ten dives; meanwhile, no one in Asia would bat an eye.
Our diving trip turned out to be the highlight of our time in Kauai. The aforementioned weather thwarted many of our plans. Kauai is known as the wettest Hawaiian island, but these weren’t ordinary tropic rains. Flooding closed roads around the island from time to time, and thick fogs obscured our views of scenic overlooks. The rainy cold weather meant we only got to spend one(!) afternoon at the beach. We tried to make the best of it. While we didn’t get to view the awesome Na Pali Coast, we cruised around in our HHR as much as possible and tried to sneak in views around the island during breaks in the rains. We pretty much stalked The Right Slice pie company at various sunshine markets around the island, with the added bonus of picking up the last local tropical fruit we’d have in a while to savor back in our condo. We relished in the comfort of our ocean view condo after a month in a campervan and discovered that Blockbuster didn’t go out of business in the year we were away. Overall, while the finale wasn’t as grand as we anticipated when we booked our Hawaiian stopover, it was a pretty darn good end to The Trip.
Our favorite coffee shop - Small Town Coffee
Palm trees on the drive-by
Our only peek of the Na Pali Coast.
We found this Hawaiian kitty hanging out outside a vintage shop on Friday Night Art Night in Hanapepe.
Minutes after downpours soaked Hanapepe, this rainbow appeared.
One of our many pieces of tropical fruit pies from The Right Slice
A slice of Kauai's gorgeous coastline - this one on the north coast.
These purple flowers were simply gorgeous.
Rainy, foggy, muddy Hanalei Valley
Flooding like this closed many of the roads while we were there.
Rain brings powerful - but muddy - waterfalls.
And rainbows. This one is over Kauai's gorgeous Waimea Canyon.
Savoring one of our last moments by the ocean!
Re-entry
After being out of the country for 13 months, our official re-entry into the United States was rather anti-climatic. I didn’t expect our homeland to give us any sort of fanfare, of course, but a smile from the Department of Homeland Security official or even a second glance at our effort to squeeze all 26 countries onto the tiny box under the line inquiring which countries we visited might have been nice. But our immigration official clearly never got the memo that he was the “face of the United States” even though he was sitting right underneath a poster that told us just that. Hopefully the United States reserves its surliest officials for its own citizens and puts the smiley ones in the foreign lines.
As I mentioned the other day, we were experiencing the second May 3, 2011 of our lives, a mistake that luckily only cost us $44 extra dollars in extra fees. (And, of course, the cost of an extra day in Hawaii, but every day in Hawaii is priceless). The first May 3 was mostly spent in the air (unfortunately utterly upright in a tiny non-reclining seat), with a small tidbit spent on the ground in Fiji. We couldn’t resist taking a peek at Fiji during our eight hour layover, even though it meant going through immigration and customs, withdrawing Fijian dollars, and haggling with a taxi driver. It’s surprising how hard it is to find the local cuisine in many countries. Everyone we asked for a restaurant recommendation kept suggesting Indian. We finally figured out why – turns out there is a proliferation of Indians in Fiji and their business savvy makes Indian food the most visible. We ended up getting a taste of Fiji via a Mediterranean restaurant owned by an American. They fixed us up some tasty mahi-mahi in a Fijian style along with cassava chips, and we spent much of our time chatting with a really friendly Fijian waitress. Much better than hanging out in the transfer room at the airport, although I got positively attacked by Fijian mosquitoes who honed in on the fresh foreign meat that are my ankles the second I walked out of the airport. I’m still paying for our brief foray into our 26th country visited on this trip. My ankles are blotchy and swollen; the itching is so bad that it kept me up last night despite only getting a few hours sleep on our flight. Thank goodness for Asian Tiger Balm.
Luckily, May 3, Round 2 turned out to be a good day. Our first order of business in the United States was to try the pretzel M&Ms that came out during our time away and that the rest of the world is not privy to. (They get crispy M&Ms instead, a forgotten relic here at home). We found them to be crunchy, salty and sweet as promised. Our next little delight was our rental car. We had reserved a $20 a day budget car on Hotwire and despite getting the hard sell to upgrade for an extra $11 a day at the desk, the parking lot attendant gave us a free upgrade to a brand-new (and rather funky) Chevy HHR out on the lot.
Although I was cursing our laziness in not reserving accommodations in advance because it meant we’d have to try to find affordable lodging in the midst of luxury resorts in our dazed and sleepy state, finding a place to stay for the next eight nights turned out to be relatively painless. We have to be the only people that show up in Kauai without reservations. The locals are friendly and when inquiring where we were planning to stay as a conversation piece, they hid their surprise well with a quick well, that’s good, keeping it flexible! when we responded sleepily that we didn’t know. We had picked up a Kauai Revealed guidebook at the airport since we liked the Revealed series so much on our honeymoon and found that most of the accommodation recommendations had been moved on-line since then. The book is a far cry from Lonely Planet’s fly by the seat of your pants approach and is clearly geared toward advance planners (which is most of the people visiting Hawaii; hell, half of them come here in tour groups). Nevertheless, despite our wavering over whether it was ridiculous to buy a guidebook for a destination in your own country, the guidebook has already served us well several times. Most notably, one of the few accommodation suggestions it had in the book was for Kapa’a Sands Resort, our home for the next week. They’re awesome little condos right by the ocean on the east side of Kauai. Ours is just a studio with a balcony and a kitchen, but it feels like a mansion to us. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I had my upteenth reminder on this trip not to sweat the small stuff and much of the time it’s just better to let things work themselves out.
Other than Sean having to endure an hour-long haircut hacking by a crazy drunk hairdresser who spoke to him at length about life forces on the island and the apparently fascinating way his hair grows, we’re enjoying our return to the States. Our culture shock at being interjected back into the United States was cushioned somewhat by our month spent in New Zealand. We already gawked at the prices and the large people (present in every car-loving country we’ve visited on this trip; food for thought) and stuffed ourselves with cheese (a food sorely lacking from our Asian diets). But culture shock is here nonetheless. Hawaii might be our most unique state but it is a state for sure. We marveled at not using a plug adapter and driving on the right (Sean’s only veered to the left once!) Our Cokes at lunch were enormous and still could be refilled for free; at dinner, the waitress automatically brought us ice waters at the beginning and our check at the end. Speaking of dinner, we had giant portions of long-awaited honest-to-goodness BBQ and (moist!) chocolate cake. We stocked up on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups at the grocery store (how could the peanut butter and chocolate taste sensation not have spread worldwide?) and chose cereal from an entire aisle of options. We’ve listened to non-stop coverage about Osama Bid Laden’s death (as opposed to a quick mention on the news in New Zealand) and there’s ridiculous reality shows and game shows that didn’t exist when we left (by the way, Mark Graff is really into his new gig). And please tell me people don’t actually wear pajama jeans?!?!
A peek at Fiji for you too...
...and a peek at Kauai. More to come on this front, of course!