For Day 13, whatever plans we had originally had now been reduced to the call of the canyon. In yesterday’s photos, there was one showing a long waterfall.

You can’t see it to the left, but there’s a box canyon that runs that way. At the edge, there is enough of a pull-off area to park your car and go hiking about 2 kilometres to get to the top of the falls. We like waterfalls, we were looking to hike…why not go for it?

We hiked across the side of the box canyon, picking out some goats on the opposite side of the wall, hard to see and the photos didn’t pick them up well enough. But you could see them with binoculars, just barely. We made our way to the edge of the waterfall area. What had looked like mostly just a small waterfall in the pic to a river that continued off the next cliff was actually a small pond area.

It was pretty well protected, and the hike wasn’t difficult, so it isn’t like we were off the beaten path. You can see metal railings at the bottom of the next photo which was mostly to stop idiots like us from getting too close to the edge of hills prone to erosion and landslides. If you missed the pond, it was a LONG way down.

We thought at first that we’d be able to work our way down and go for a swim. Or perhaps to get across the water area and climb up the next hill, which would have let us see a long vista down the valley/canyon.

But it was not to be. It was a great hike, far less strenuous than the one on the Northwest shore, and with great views. It was all we wanted to do for the day, visit the Canyon.

Later in the day, we stopped by a local artisan shop and looked at a lot of products made with local wood. I seem to recall buying a bowl, and a couple of carvings.

And then we went for a really nice dinner at a rooftop hotel restaurant across from our inn. We chatted with the serving staff, and as with earlier conversations, we were curious how people made it there if they weren’t local. The server for the night had followed his mom to the island, she was some sort of manager of some local franchised store (like Walmart or something, I forget now), and he was stopping out from school at the University of Oregon to hang out in Kauai. It seemed like a sweet gig.

This, of course, got us thinking about the age-old question — what would we do if we wanted to live here full-time? The canyon had totally captured our hearts and our imagination. And we hadn’t even made it to the West Coast of the island yet. We were still wondering if the next day might turn out to be the excursion of the trip.