Day's End



David walking underneath Bali Hi...interesting we should have pitched up there as we'd just been in St Louis with Ali who'd just finished a run of South Pacific at the Fox Theatre; well, I thought that was interesting...

 Mission accomplished. Spent a couple of wonderful sunny - if windy- hours on Nukoli'i beach. It was almost deserted, possibly because this counts as a cold snap on Kauai(22 C down to 20 C at night...lovely for sleeping and even too chilly for the mozzies it seems!)
Our days here seem to be forming nicely into getting up and going out early while the sun is around and then retreating to our comfy hotel THE KAUAI INN for afternoon rests when the cloud rolls in.
Yesterday's treat was the LIMAHULI GARDEN - the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The backdrop to it is Makana mountian which towers over the valley, commonly referred to as Bali Hai, from the film South Pacific. The garden neatly combines a bit of Kaua'i culture and history alongside the plants of the island;it's doing a good job of conserving and reintroducing plants too.It's the only place with a forest made up of 100% native Hawaiian species.But apart from all that worthiness, it's just beautiful;the sunlight sifts citrus green through the canopy and the Limahuli stream makes a cool line to follow.
Talking of water....we did have rain last night - but nothing like the amounts we had in Costa Rica. There it tipped down every day, except for miraculously, Christmas Day! A possible low point of our trip (and doubtless there will be more)was having to spend a night in the HOTEL ARANJUEZ in San Jose which was not equipped for the cool temperatures. A COLD shower was
followed by a night in a bed with a thin blanket -so I slept in jogging bottoms,nightie and fleece jacket. Could have stayed home for that!
Here, we found this hotel by ringing around after we stepped off the plane and it's cosy and they're very hospitable. Palms rattle outside our window...sounding like rain, so it's always great to find that it's not the case. Kauai does boast the wettest spot on earth, on one part of the island they have 500+ inches a year, so we can't take all the credit for rain making
(David and I do seem to have this way of arriving to precipitation wherever we travel!)
For a thumbnail sketch of this island, imagine incredibly verdant with roosters running around everywhere (no-one asks why the chicken crosses the road) and intense red earth; they dye t-shirts using the soil....one bucket stains 500 shirts. White sand beaches - but not intense turquoise water at this moment. Everywhere we've been the water has been pretty troubled and either grey or dark; always somewhere out to sea a storm has been brewing and the legacy is water that pounds on to shore. Yesterday they had 15 ft waves on the North shore here. On our Caribbean cruise most of the snorkeling and diving excursions were cancelled and there was no chance of us trying to snorkel in Costa Rica either. Hopefully we will get to do some before journey's end!
Enough for now...I'm not sure what time this post will be shown as...I have feeling it's still displaying Miami time..anyway it's 6 pm here and almost time for a Cuba Libre (with Costa Rican Centenario rum and diet pepsi) we've developed some very decadent habits......