We took two island tours away from the resort today. The first was to take the river boat tour to the Fern Grotto. It was pretty staid and uneventful. The thing I remembered from my childhood visit to the grotto was that we could walk all the way into the grotto. Unfortunately, a series of heavy rains more than a decade ago made clear that the ground above the grotto was too loose to be safe, so now tourists aren’t allowed to enter. Instead, we viewed the grotto from a platform at some distance, in the sunlight where it was both hot and humid, while musicians played for us. They also played for us on the boat ride back.
We were scheduled for a 4 PM helicopter tour of the island, including a landing at a waterfall that had been shown in Jurassic Park. However, we had a number of hours to kill between the Fern Grotto and the helicopter tour, so we made a stop at Wailua Falls and then drove to Waipouli for some snacks and downtime.
We got to the airport in Lihue at 3:15 PM in time to check in (and weigh in), and just before 4 PM, we boarded our helicopter. W and I were extremely lucky to get two front passenger seats, him in the middle and me on the far right. I had forgotten to wear dark clothing to avoid my clothes being reflected in the windows (and ruining my photos), but the tour operators gave me a dark t-shirt to drape over my light green shirt. Hsuan and J sat in the second row, along with two other fellow tourists.
We all wore headsets, so we could hear the pilot over the sound of the helicopter itself. In order to speak back to him, though, we had to use separate microphones. (It turns out he bought his first house in La Cañada, so he knows the Pasadena area.)
Shortly after we lifted off and headed inland, the pilot started playing music from his iPod nano, piped over our headsets. The first song: The J Bond Theme (from “Dr. No.”).
The second: The Theme from Mission Impossible.
It was a great way to set the mood for much of our tour, between the times he’d cut the music to talk about what we were seeing or flying over. Other movie themes included Jurassic Park and Braveheart, plus some pop and rock songs on occasion.
Our first destination was Manawaiopuna Falls, more popularly known as Jurassic Falls, or the waterfall near which the helicopter landed toward the beginning of the movie. (Many other falls are from the islands are seen in the movie, but this one is specific to the helicopter landing — which I verified by comparing my photos with the movie.) Many tours fly over the falls, but we booked a tour that actually landed nearby, so we could walk to the falls and hang around a bit. During the approach, our pilot flew us through the narrow canyon leading up to the falls, while the Theme from Jurassic Park — or the Journey to the Island track from he album — played over our headsets.
Seen from the base of the falls, the foreshortened perspective from looking upward makes it hard to tell how tall they are, but they’re listed at about 400 ft. And maybe the movie was filmed with a perspective to emphasize the falls height. (Actually, throughout the tour, I found it hard to gauge sizes — the terrain in some parts of Kauai are so awesomely eroded and jagged that gigantic formations, abundant everywhere, seem “ordinary”. One spectacular waterfall is followed by a half-dozen others. One impossibly steep canyon is followed by three more. One cliff face that extends up to the clouds is… well, we could be surrounded by vertical cliff faces extending upward to the clouds, with no top in sight.)
The Jurassic Falls were a very nice, restful stop. The helicopter landed at a pad nearby, and the pilot shut everything down. We walked the trail to the falls and just hung around for a while. The air was clean and refreshing, and the sound of the falls was both soothing and exciting. I noted an optical effect of how the water arcs or doesn’t appear to arc (when there’s no water) as the falls hit various outcroppings, with the lines always being reproduced, and I pointed it out to the pilot. He complimented my observation, while I admitted I was merely thinking about how a computer rendition might fake the effect.
I was surprised — then later not so surprised — to find that the falls are located on privately-owned land. That probably made filming easier — easier to get permission, possibly, from the owners than to get permission from the state when filming in a state park. I was also surprised to learn that the falls are fed entirely from accumulated rain water from the plateau (rather a bowl-shaped area) above.
After about 15 minutes, we got back in the helicopter and took off. The pilot flew us west-northwest to Waimea Canyon, and then he flew us to the Na’pali Coast. While Waimea Canyon does deserve its nickname as the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, I had to admit I found Na’pali Coast even more spectacular. The cliff walls on the coast are more shear, in some places almost vertical for what appears to be as much as a few thousand feet of elevation, going straight down to the coastline. There are deep, narrow canyons along the coast of such extreme narrowness and vertical scale that I had thought such things existed only in Bryce 3D renderings, not in the physical world. But there they were.
The flight through Waimea Canyon seemed almost secondary compared to the Na’pali coast flight, with the pilot relishing flying over the water along the coast, and then flying into a canyon on occasion, approaching the canyon walls for close-up views before returning to the coastline, only to fly north to visit yet another canyon.
Throughout the tour, I kept looking down through the window at my feet, seeing the canyon floors and rivers and thinking that people had never visited these areas on foot, so remote were the areas and so extremely rugged was the terrain.
I also spent this part of the tour trying hard not the vomit from the increasing air sickness. Barf bags were nearby, on the right of the pilots console. W and Hsuan had taken air sickness medicine. Hsuan later said she was very calm during the tour. W, I noticed, had fallen asleep a few times. Neither J nor I took the medicine.
On the way back to the airport, the pilot flew us to Mt. Waialeale, the island’s volcano that is also the wettest spot on earth, or one of the wettest spots, anyway. The top of the volcano was hidden in the clouds, but he was able to approach the sides of the crater and fly by the Wall of Tears (waterfalls).
After returning to the airport (and after tipping both the pilot and one of the staff), we promptly drove back to Poipu and the resort for dinner.