Sunday – Nawiliwili, Kauai

We didn’t arrive till 10.00am, so we were able to get in our church service at 9.00am. This time Walt, the pastor, had a stool, just in case! We had communion as well, which was, I imagine a fairly conservative Baptist flavour, but we used the priest’s chalice, ciborium and hosts, dipping the host in the wine. I had time to grab an Explorations coffee, which I finished while waiting in the showroom for our tour to be called. They split our group by calling forward twelve and then another twelve and so on, but she was insisting that only couples or fours or sixes go in the group; I was a bit annoyed as there were one or two besides me who were singles and we were being pushed to the side. However, it worked out for the best because the other buses had 12 in a minibus and we only had 9 – much more comfortable!

We first had a short drive through the pretty town and down to the Wailua River where we joined a riverboat. There was a music team on board and we had music and hula and we even got to all stand up and do a hula ourselves. It was a lovely, peaceful, relaxing glide to the Fern Grotto, which is a beautiful, natural structure with ferns hanging down, an old spiritual site. I wasn’t aware that there was quite some human sacrifice in years gone by on these islands.

Next we went for a drive along the “North Shore” which is an upper class area, with homes owned by some famous people, as well as sites where various movies were filmed in part. Their two famous lava mountains are The Sleeping Giant and the Sleeping Pregnant Goddess – quite striking formations. We saw the Kilauea Lighthouse and had lunch on Anini Beach. Of course, so many beaches around here have a significant surf, always waves you can ride. Lots of standing paddle boards in the quieter waters too.

Wild chickens everywhere on this island. It was fun to watch the chicks following mum around.

Ungainly albatross wander clumsily around looking for food for their chicks; they’re protected and apparently it’s quite a sight to see these magnificent birds spread their 7ft wingspan and use the road as a runway to “take off”.

It was a much more leisurely excursion than yesterday, and the second half was rather less inspiring, but it was pretty good all up. Still we only just got back in time to board before sailaway, so I didn’t get to do any wifi ashore. Never mind!

Dinner was 4 of us – Nancy and John had gone to bed because they didn’t feel like having any dinner, so we took a picture of the 4 of us and we agreed that Debbie would make sure we’ll all be there tomorrow night for formal night, in all our good clobber so we can get a group picture done.

There was an enormous Mother’s Day cake at the entrance to the dining room, but we didn’t get to sample it! Maybe the late sitting did??

I was just in Explorations at 9.15 to do some wifi and I thought I felt the engines stop; it was hard to tell because you can’t see out in the dark from the cafe because it’s higher up. Every now and again the ship was shuddering and I thought something must be going on. Anyway, 15 mins later I was walking downstairs and the Captain announced that we were back off the port of Nawiliwili again because a sick passenger had to be transported ashore. The shuddering is the bow of the ship being hit by the significant waves out here. We have to wait for the tender to come back from shore and get loaded again before we can resume our journey, which will set us back about 4 hours.

The tender got hoisted up right outside my window just after 10.00pm, and we’re under way again, so they were able to complete that whole exercise pretty quickly. It’s nice that I get to watch the lights of port sailing past again.