Day 5 Manoa Falls

I have to skip to this day because it was so incredible...and as always with places like this, pictures do not do it justice.

At the Luau the other night, the narrator said that Hawaiians are very spiritual people. There is no way you can see what we saw today and not at least acknowledge that a creator exists...

We caught two city busses to get to the Manoa Falls trail. We left behind a tropical beach and sun and 15 miles away we had arrived in a tropical rainforest! There are 150 climate categories in the world, Hawaii has almost all of these climates. The closer we got the bigger and greener everything got!!!! we felt like we were in the Alice and Wonderland movie set!





















Manoa Falls




At this point most people turn around and walk back to the bus...we found a small trail climbing up the side of the mountain in the rock. Of course we headed up the mountain!!! It's always worth it to go off road!! Just a little side note-wild boar roam the mountains here-so as a precaution we told Beka to call in the troops if she didn't hear from us...





This is one tree. The roots grow down to the ground from the limbs.




Most parts of the trail were very narrow and had steep drop offs. You couldn't tell on some parts because the foliage was so thick.




We walked for about an hour up up up the mountain. Some parts got really dark and thick and some parts were rainy. It looked just like Fern Gully!!! We finally got to a clearing. Off to the left a small foot trail followed the rim of the mountain. Literally 4' width at the top and steep drops on either side. The wind was very very strong, clouds were starting to settle over the mountain, our cell phone battery's were dying, we had no idea how far the trail went so we walked until we had to turn back to give ourselves enough time to get back down the mountain.










One of the bamboo forests we walked through...It was very dense and very little light gets through even in the middle of the day!


At the bus stop we were able to identify where we had just hiked. If you look about 1finger width from the left of the photo you see a small clearing. From there we hiked to the right up the dip, across the flat (looks flat from this view...nothing was flat) part, up up up to the peak of the tallest part, across that peak and then turned back...we weren't sure if it looped back around and we were running out of daylight.




This has been my favorite day so far!!! I feel ALIVE in the outdoors!!! Whether it is in the red rock of Moab, the coffee colored river in Branford, or the rainforest of Hawaii...I choose this over commercialized, man made activities and things any day of the week!!!


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Location:Oahu, Hawaii