On Sunday, Joe watched the boys and I got to boat down the Na Pali coast on my own. It was nice to spend a few hours not having to worry about small boys throwing themselves with abandon into the open ocean, and being able to snorkel without taking turns. It also meant that I could take as many pictures as I wanted without a small boy requesting to take pictures of his own!
About 16 of us made our way slowly down the coast, damp from the boat’s wake, in caves and under waterfalls, beside the slow green sea turtles who are more at home in the water than the land.
The cliffs towered over us, steep and green. Our guides were astonished at the ocean’s calm, and whenever we stopped, we could see down through the clear blue to the coral at the bottom, 30 to 50 feet below us, with all the fish in between.
And above us, always above us, the rock cliffs loomed, growing higher and greener the further we went on.
Because of the calm, we were able to go into sea caves that had been closed all the last summer, our little boat entering the black arches and backing out again, our eyes needing to get used to the bright daylight again.
I had thought that the Na Pali coast was just sheer cliffs, and it was a lot of that, but it also had its share of deep green valleys, and scores and scores of caves. They lined the whole coast, created by the pounding winter waves that were hard to imagine on this summer day that was too calm even to give anyone sea sickness.
There were also caves created by the mountain waterfalls that fell thousands or hundreds of feet, carrying the rain and mist and clouds from the cliff tops, throwing them down into the valleys, where they became rivers.
Of everything here, the steady, high rocks, and the green that remains constant all the months of the year, it is the water that never rests. It goes from cloud to rain to waterfall to valley to another waterfall to ocean, where it finally lands in peace among the flashing fish and steady sea turtles.
The coast is too rugged for roads and habitation, but occasionally we saw hikers, the few every day who trek the eleven miles down the Na Pali coast, into valleys and up mountains, and occasionally on ledges so narrow that two people cannot fit side by side.
Even these people though, while closer to the coast than we are, never stay. They camp for the night and then go back. A few hundred years ago Hawaiians lived here, drinking from these waterfalls, and growing taro, which they pounded into purple poi. They used these small caves as shelter, from storms and the strong winter waves, and used these fog covered mountains for protection from enemies.
But today, only visitors (though there are many), are the only ones who come here, for a couple hours or at most a couple days, to this dramatic edge of Kauai, in the midst of the Pacific.