21. August 2022

Day 79: Kaua'i - Beach Day

Sport in the morning

We started the day with sport session, for me it was running time. Even though we started early, it was already hot & humid, so the run felt harder than expected. Nicole used my away time to do some Freeletics.

Beaches

Our first planned stop was Queen’s Bath in Princeville, but we were to late to grab a parking spot. There was the option to park at the Golf Resort, but they charged 20$ for that… Felt like too much to just quickly visit the beach. So we skipped this one.

Next stop was Hanelei Bay, which is a pretty long beach in a half circle Bay. Today it had pretty impressive waves, so we went for a session of swimming & wave jumping. Was really fun :)

After that we were a bit unlucky, or not too good informed. We next tried Tunnels Beach, but the parking was crowded and we didn’t manage to get a spot. Same for some other beaches along the way to Haena State Park. So in the end we decided to head back to the apartment and then go again to Poipu Beach for sunset.

Poipu Beach

In the end there wasn’t much time in the apartment, as we wanted to do a ~2 hour walk along the shore line near Poipu Beach, before sunset.

After the ~30 minutes drive, we first struggled a bit to find a parking lot. There were multiple that belong to resorts & hotels and a small one without any information. In the end we assumed it’s public and just parked there.

Just 5 minutes of walking and we saw some impressive waves clashing against the lava rock cliff.

Soon we then saw into the next bay, which was dominated by the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

Here it was again the same as on Maui and there was a public trail that led through the Hotel. So the Beach is accessible for everyone. After we crossed the beach, there was a small viewpoint on the other side.

From there the trail was then in sand, which made progress a bit harder.

Then we came into a stony mini bay, which was completely different. It was overall fascinating how different the bays along this shoreline stretch were.

From then on the sand and trail turned to reddish soil. We continued a bit on but at ~4km we decided to turn around to not miss the sunset at Poipu Beach.

Sunset

We made it really in time and the setting was amazing. Beside of the beauty of the sunset, we also saw a Monk Seal which was chilling at the beach, but left shortly after sunset because he got cold.