We wound our way down from the canyon back towards the south shore of this beautiful Hawaiian island much of which was devastated by a hurricane in 1982. All the residential housing and hotel resorts have been rebuilt and the residual evidence of the hurricane is hard to spot to the untrained eye. As a precaution against future hurricanes, however, many of the electricity transmission poles have been constructed out of aluminium and designed to withstand the worst winds. The first photo shows these poles and looks down to the main diesel generating station and deep-water port at Port Ellen.
If you recall the Balmoral had diverted to this port on the evening before our arrival in Honolulu to transfer a sick passenger. According to Sunny our driver/guide our fellow passenger should have been well looked after since the third biggest employers on this island of 65,000 people are hospitals.
As I have already mentioned the biggest constraints to development on the Hawaiian Islands is the need to import everything from mainland USA and the dependency on diesel generated power. Everything has to be off-loaded from container ships in Honolulu to dumb barges that are then towed by a fleet of tugs to the other islands (See photo of a barge leaving Honolulu).
Custom built barges transport diesel, petrol and aviation gas. In Kauai this is all brought to Port Ellen on the south side of the island and then by road tanker - see the photo of the huge Kenworthy truck - back to Lihue the capital and the airport.
The vast amounts of rainfall mean that the island is blessed with many varieties of trees some native but many invasive species blown in by hurricanes and storms. On one stretch of our route the trees have interlaced their canopies over the road to form a mile or so long tunnel.
Lolling on a beach we also caught sight of a ‘Monk Seal’. Sorry I don’t know why they are called that so I will have to do more updating when I get home.
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