Scooting around Kauai

After the installation of British Invasion was complete, I had plenty of time on my hands. Now I can start to enjoy the regular schedule of working on a cruise ship. My first two months were anomalous.

A regular schedule means being able to get off in port. Except for the aforementioned In-Port Manning days, when maintenance and laundry are done, I have port days off. There’s always evening entertainment, but it’s usually after we’ve sailed. So I get a day in the Hawaiian Islands.

This Nawiliwili, on the island of Kauai, I rented scooters with a couple friends. I ran into them in the little shopping center right off the ship, and with nothing else to do, I decided to accompany them on a scooter adventure. Why not.

Our little scooters were pretty awesome. They were easy to ride, easy to control and went pretty quickly. On the downhills we could get up to 50 mph. The roads on Kauai are pretty friendly, with only one highway, with a usual speed limit of 40. The country roads have speed limits of 25. We felt very safe along the roads, and only got yelled at a couple times by passing motorists.

We drove around the area heading to some waterfalls and scenic drives. We went up the Wailua River, saw some waterfalls from a distance, looked over the royal valley of Kauai and visited some ruins of temples. We puttered around inland to an arboretum, heading to the end of the road, where the river washed over the pavement. We headed back to a beach for a quick dip in the water, since it was a hot day. We went to Lydgate Park, a beach that I had visited as a kid. It has an amazing playground, which we did not explore, and a sheltered cove with good snorkeling, which we did explore, briefly.

After a quick stop at the beach, we headed to a secluded waterfall and swimming hole that the scooter rental guy had told us about. After getting turned around, thanks to our low quality map, we followed a local to the right place. We hiked down to the falls, which were completely deserted. We had a few minutes to ourselves to contemplate the 20+ foot drop and rope swing before other people made their way down. They had been there before and assured us that the bottom was very deep and it was safe to jump. So jump we did.

It was my first time jumping off a cliff. I’ve fallen off one (a small one on Vieques in Puerto Rico), and jumped off a ladder partway up a waterfall (in Israel), but I have never before stood on top of a cliff, with a stream falling away next to me, looking down at an indistinctly-far-away pool and jumped. When I went, the fall was long enough to give an experience of falling. Not just a brief sensation that you get when diving into a pool, or jumping off an 8’ platform in the theater. Not the sensation from a really high bounce on a trampoline. Something distinctly different. You’re in a different level of gravity as the structures holding your insides no longer take weight. Free fall. And then it was gone. Such a brief experience, but something completely different.

We were getting close to the crew all-aboard time, so we had to leave the falls before we would have liked, then scoot back to the rental place. We made it aboard with time to spare, after a wonderful tour of the southwest corner of Kauai.