Just kidding, Kauai is called The Garden Island although I didn't see too many gardens until I went to the other side of the Island but I did see chickens (moa), lots and lots of moa all running wild around the island.

I was told that Kauai was more authentic Hawaiian and less spoiled by tourism but I did not feel the same spirit of Aloha as I had on O'ahu and in Waikiki, this surprised me a bit. I struck my first problem when I got off the plane and wandered out to the transport area, there was a largish information centre all neatly stocked with brochures but no one was in the booth.

I needed a shuttle, I had read that there was one on Kauai, there were no official staff anywhere and no sign of a shuttle service, all the other passengers seemed to be local they climbed in cars and were off. Eventually I asked a lady who had a uniform on who was leaning against a post what was the go with shuttles. She said where you staying, I said Aston Islander on the Beach she said they don't have a shuttle. Great. I said is there a general shuttle, no she said with no further information coming I asked how I might get to my hotel so she said have to get a taxi, I looked around and there were no taxi's so I said so and she reluctantly added you have to use the telephone on the side of the information booth. I did that and did arrive at my hotel only to be met with some very uninformative reception staff.

I am not kidding, I felt most unwelcome and quite confused. The hotel didn't have a restaurant or room service so I asked where could I eat. I was told I could drive to restaurants, I don't have a car, then the receptionist pointed towards the main road and said there is the shops our there. There was no information in the room either but I did wander out the front to find there was a sort of shopping mall area which had some takeaway shops, a couple of small restaurants and an overpriced convenience store. I am sure Kauai is warm and welcoming if you have a package tour booked and other people didn't seem to have a problem but the revues in this hotel on Trip Advisor were not all that good. No one said I would have problems getting information at the airport though, if it was a third world country I wouldn't gripe but I kind of felt like I was in a third world county when in fact I was in the United States of America. They did have a nice pool and a bar area as well as laundry facilities and a kitchenette but my request for tea bags from room maids and from reception and was met with blank stares. Do check with Trip Advisor before booking anything, this hotel did have some negative comments when I booked it but there is not a great deal to choose from on Kauai and it is centrally located at Kapa'a and it is on the beach. Apparently the apartments are individually owned so you take pot luck as to the condition inside.

Next day I headed out on my Waimea Canyon tour with a whole pile of other people in a small tour bus and a driver called Vinnie. Vinnie was a local and was quite entertaining, he could also give first hand information about the changes that had occurred on Kauai since his birth. He said that sugar cane was the main income of Kauai when he was young and people like his family lived in Sugar Cane company houses in compounds that were called camp no 1 etc. He said he lived in Camp No 5 which he said had been demolished but he showed us one of the remaining camps. The housing looked like public type housing, all the same and not very big with small backyards too I snapped a photo out the bus window. It is not very riveting so I won't include it here.

Kauai, the chicken or garden island, is the oldest island in the chain which were once named The Sandwich Islands by dear old Captain James Cook who also discovered Australia. The land mass of Hawaii is a product of a fault in the earth's crust, a great chasm to the earth's core spews magma and then lava out and builds land and as the pacific tectonic plate moves north the volcanoes become extinct and new ones form in their wake. Kauai is off the fault area and is a well established island in terms of soil and vegetation and also the erosion that occurs over millions of years. Those interested in the Volcanic hot spot and tectonic plate of Hawaii can find information here.

Polynesians came here about 800 years ago and brought chickens and pigs and some of their own vegetation, later settlers bought their own bits of home with them too so it is an island made up of lots of things that were once not native. I guess that can be said of most places on earth but Hawaii is newly inhabited enough for us to know where things came from. Can you imagine a place without nasties, no spiders and no mosquitoes, actually there was one nasty, it is a sort of large centipede about nine inches long which became quite a problem in the sugar cane days when these things used to sting the workers. Fleas, rats and mosquitoes came with the ships. They had a rat problem so they found out that Mongoose can kill rats so they imported some of those, only to find out that rats were nocturnal and mongoose diurnal and so never the twain did meet. The island of Kauai has its fair share of Mongoose as does Maui and Hawaii. Cute little furry things but Vinnie said don't mess with them, he also said don't mess with them chickens either, especially the cockerels. I must confess to seeing only one mongoose there and did not get bitten or stung by anything else but then I didn't go camping or hiking.

The picture above is a birthing stone site, it does not look the same as the one I saw on O'ahu but it is recognised as the site for Royal Births on Kauai. Vinnie said they had a ritual that they threw the umbilical chord on a stone and if the rats ate it the child would die but if the rats left it alone the child would live. Could be a local legend as I had not heard that anywhere else. Behind this site is a pathway which leads to a rise over the valley. Vinnie said they rang bell stones when a child was born so the people in the villages would know. He said when he was a kid they used to run around hitting the stones to find the ones which rang, they rang down the valley and he and his friends got into trouble.

The picture on the right is a canoe stop for the canoe tours, it is, I was told, a re-enacted village (just like I had been wanting to see) but this tour didn't go there, nor did any of the other bus type tours, you could drive there or go in a canoe.

Basically one gets a ride up the Wailua River, the only navigable waterway in the whole of Hawaii but even that doesn't go too far but it does go to the fern Grotto (ma'ama'akua lono). When you arrive at the jetty you walk through a rather nice area of rainforest which has been planted out with tropical plants so lots of colour. There were wild moa with chicks of course and we could hear the wild pigs snuffling around in the undergrowth, fortunately they didn't come near us. The Fern Grotto is an old lava tube upon which a lot of ferns have grown. You are romantically serenaded Hawaiian style, you can see the musicians in the photo below. They played the Hawaiian wedding song and I didn't think much of the singers voice but there you go. On the way back they were on our boat and sang and danced all the way home and yes, they did make people get up and do the hula. The grotto was pretty but the whole boat ride and thing was very cheesy if you ask me.

on September 11, 1992 Hurricane Iniki hit the island and caused major damage. Steven Spielberg was filming Jurassic Park at the time so the cast and crew were stranded as communications and transport were brought to a halt. Extensive damage was done to the island and 6 people died. Cyclone warnings were late in coming so people were not prepared although it would have been difficult to be prepared with such a hurricane hitting the island directly. We heard a lot about this cyclone on the tours, here we were in 2009, 17 years later and we were still hearing about why this building or that building had not been restored, removed or rebuilt. It was like one giant excuse as to why certain things were not up to scratch. We passed the Coco Palms Resort several times, it was the hotel made famous in Elvis' movie Blue Hawaii but it was a boarded up wreck and an eyesore. You would have thought that some effort would have been made in 17 years to tidy things up and not use the hurricane as an excuse for so long.

I must confess to being surprised at the dwellings in Hawaii in view of the fact that hurricanes head their way probably more often than they do in Cairns where I live. The houses looked like they were made of packing case material, some kind of timber with strips over the top and the roofs had tiles made of composite material. They looked flimsy. In contrast are the dwellings in Far North Queensland which have a building code which makes them more cyclone resistant. Corrugated iron roofs which extra reinforcement on the first row of screws to stop the wind ripping the tin off and walls made of concrete blocks which have cement poured into the outer walls makes the buildings here better able to withstand cyclonic winds. I had often wandered why tornadoes reduced houses to matchsticks, seems like they are built of light material and not designed to withstand these weather conditions. How odd it was, I would have thought that more substantial buildings would have been designed to withstand hurricanes but not so.

The next day I took the Kauai North Shore Limo tour with another set of people. I like these little tours you get to talk to people and find out where they are from. I had (a host free) lunch with our driver whose name I cannot remember and three people from the Bronx so I took the opportunity to ask them if it is true that New Yorkers don't talk to each other but if someone is from out of town they are very helpful towards them. They laughed and said it was true, Angel said he doesn't want to encourage local people in NY to talk to him cos they might be hard to get rid of that is why they don't talk to or help each other out but are quite willing to go out of their way for a stranger. They were on holidays so were quite friendly probably in the knowledge that none of us would turn up on their doorstep looking for a handout any time soon. They also said that the neighbourhood was rough but they had grown up there but they didn't venture out into the streets at night. I guess you get used to the place you live in and adjust your behaviour accordingly. The pictures above and the one on the left below are from the bird sanctuary, there is also a lighthouse there but it was a bit boring so I didn't include it here. There were birds everywhere, some flying overhead and pooping from a great height and some nesting in the ground, I took a photo of a bird in the ground but missed my subject cos the sun was too bright but never mind. The photos are a bit small to see them but there were white patches where birds were nesting along the cliffs, not as many as I saw in Skellig Michael in Ireland but still plenty.

We drove around the shore towards Princeville resorts and Hanalei and the coastline just got better and better. All the islands I saw were like this, they have a sort of boring side and a spectacular side. The photo below right is an example of early aqua culture, the Hawaiians dig areas out next to a river or find one naturally and insert bamboo poles or sticks along the mouth, the small fish swim in and they get fed in the reservoir and then are too fat to swim out so it forms a nice holding pen of fish which can be caught and eaten at leisure. I saw one of these on the Big Island too not quite so elaborate but it was a coastal holding pen - very clever in the days before refrigeration you had fresh fish you didn't have to go out and catch each day.

It is not likely I will return to Kauai, I didn't find it good value for money but I am glad I saw the Canyon, a bit of Hanalei and the albatross. If I were to return I would probably hire a car, there are not that many roads to get mixed up on for a left hand drive person and I would head to Hanalei with a short stop at the re enactment village and the birthing stones I saw on the road to the Opaeaka'a falls. Hanalei, as we drove through it, looked like a quaint villagey kind of place not unlike Kuranda, slightly bohemian and sort of touristy. It looked interesting. I loved the country around there, the beaches were gorgeous although we did not really stop at any of them we had been so badly delayed in the early part of the day there was no time later on. I would stay in Hanalei and probably enjoy myself. Sandra and David from Oahu, lived here and said it was the pick of places on Kauai and I can believe it.

Next stop Maui, I loved Lahaina and had a great time on Maui

Hilo, Hawaiian Tropical Botanic Gardens, Honomu Village, Night Flight over Volcano, Day flight over volcano, Mauna Kea observatories, native village and Holualoa

Holualoa, Kailua Kona, Kilauea Iki, Pu'ukohola Heiau

Lahaina, The Road to Hana and some beautiful sunsets

The Chicken Island - Oops I mean the garden isle

I spent 6 days on Oahu and in Waikiki and 2 days on the way out

I spent 10 days here having fun with Martha and Jan

A stopover on my way to and from England

Crikey !! The Late Steve Irwin's Zoo

The Village in The Rainforest

Radley Oxford, Abingdon, Cheltenham, Belas Knapp, Cotswolds, Guiting Power, Oxford Castle Medieval Fair

Bus lotto in London, the Tower of London, Trafalgar and Hen racing at the Radley Fete,

Oxford City, St Mary The Virgin Church, Christchurch College, Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Bourton on the Water

The Forest is just beautiful. Soudley, Coleford, Rhaglan Castle, Newent Gloucestershire, The Shambles Victorian Village, Chepstow, Symonds Yat, Monmouth, Tintern

Journey to Ireland and the adventures of two mad women on the loose. Corwen, Betws y Coed, Snowdonia mountains, Anglesey,
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
better known as Llanfair pg, Dublin, Amagh, Port Rush, Giants Causeway

Boyle, Mullaghroe, Tobercurry, Gorteen County Sligo, Drumanone Dolmen, Arigna Mine. Ballina, Ceide Fields County Mayo, Killala, Strokestown, Tulsk, Elphin Windmill, Mullingar, Roscommon Town, Lough Key

From top to bottom what a maginficent place. Galway, Cnoc Suan, Spidall, Ailwee Caves, The Burren, Listowel, Valentia, Portmagee, Skellig Michael, Waterford Crystal, Wexford

Martha and Adam did a charity walk along an ancient route, I played chauffeur, did some sightseeing and got stuck in Swindon. West Wycome, Wayland Smithy, Barbury Castle, Avebury

Cardiff Castle, St Fagans

Newquay, Boscastle, Museum of Witchcraft, Tintagel, Lands End, Minack Theatre, Mousehole, Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor

Banbury Cross, Coventry City and Cathedral, Spon Street, Lady Godiva, Althorpe (Lady Dianna Spencer's home) and Manchester

Ing near Kendall, Lake Windemere, Gretna Green, Glencoe, Inchcree, Invergary, Loch Duich, Kyle of Lochalsh, Portree, Isle of Skye, Kilmuir, Uig, Dunvegan, Dumnadrochit, Loch Ness, Corrimony Cairn

Inverness, Cullodden Battlefield ,Brora, John O'Groats, Orkney Islands, Flotta, Burwall, Stromness, Skara Brae, Ring of Brodgar, Standing Stones of Stenness, Kirkwall, Edinburgh Castle, Cheviot Mountains, Newcastle, Segedunum, Hadrians Wall, Sandford Loch, London airport, Singapore