Day 3 - Kayaking Wailua River

On our 3rd day in Kauai, we started out with a river trip. We kayaked the Wailua River.  The Wailua River is a long, slowly meadering river that starts at the Wai'ale'ale Crater (the wettest place on earth) and is fed by several tributaries on the way to the ocean. This is the only navigable river in all of Hawaii. It was pretty easy to kayak and very pretty scenery along the way.  In the picture here (above), you can barely see a red kayak on the water.

We "pulled out"  of the river and took a short hike to Secret Falls.  It's a great waterfall that is about 1 mile off the river.  

The water was nice and cool to swim in , and it was a perfect place to take a break, eat lunch, and enjoy the beauty.  

Along the way we got some more great pictures of the scenery.  Everything was so GREEN! (just ignore the cheesy poses.)  

Secret Falls was so tall that it was hard to get a good picture of it.  I wish we would've stood back further to get a better shot.  

(so although these aren't the best pictures for lighting or perspective - you can still see that it's very beautiful.)

On our way back on the trail, there was one river crossing.

 Below the

 crossing was this smaller waterfall that ran over several large boulders. So of course, we climbed over the boulders to get more pictures. 

After this little jaunt, we kayaked down a different fork in the river to get to 

a well known (local) swimming hole - complete with a rope swing and some cliff jumping.  There was no one there while we were, so that made it kinda fun.  I haven't done any cliff jumping since my last time at Lake Powell -- and that was a LONG time ago -- so even though this wasn't very high, I still let out a little yelp on the way down