Friday, August 05, 2005

Pools of Mokolea

After getting a little sunburned on our first day out at the beach, we decided to try and find alternate adventures for when the sun is at it’s highest. Only trouble is, “alternate adventures” require motivation, which we are both lacking at the moment. The Ultimate Kauai Guidebook (the book everyone on the island is carrying around, including us, thanks to Patrick Collins) wrote this about the Pools of Mokolea:

For those looking for a beautiful, wild shoreline hike but don’t want something too long and strenuous, this may be the ticket.

They go on to say that it is a 1/4 mile hike, or 1/2 mile if you don’t have a 4WD vehicle, which we don’t. Although, as we neared the end of the 4WD road, we realized, it wasn’t as tough as the book made it out to be. And knowing I wouldn’t want to hike back up the hill after hiking and then swimming all afternoon, I decided to run up to the car and just drive it down the dirt road. (Agna, you would have been proud of me.) I’d like to point out too, that the hike/run was actually 3/4 mile.

After meeting Rob at the end of the road with the car, we walked around the shoreline checking out the lava and tide pools. Scattered around is a lot of old, rusty metal equipment, dumped by the sugar companies over the years, which has become “an intriguing part of the landscape.”

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Finally, you come around to this Jacuzzi-sized hold in the lava where the ocean surges in and out. It was fantastic and mesmerizing to watch. The water would rise in the hole like a soufflé and then get sucked out with the tide right before a big wave would fill it up again. Swimming in the middle of the hole, was a sea turtle. Difficult to tell if he was enjoying himself or not but I would hope a sea turtle could figure out an escape route when he was ready. In a pure moment of luck, Rob took a video of the hole and happened to get the turtle rising up in the middle of it.

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On the hike out, we saw some dead alien fish. Can you identify these?

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Finally, before leaving, we got to body surf in some pretty amazing waves. Others were using surfboards but that will have to wait until later in the trip for us.

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