Waipi'o Valley

On Saturday Carl, River and I went hiking at the most beautiful and magical place I've ever been. Its called Waipi'o Valley, and everyone needs to go there. You have to have a 4WD vehicle to get down there because (1)the road down into the valley is SUPER steep and 1 lane, (2) once in the valley the roads are not paved and are full of potholes and mini lakes, and (3) you have to drive through rivers, literally.

The photos in this post are only of the valley. We'll put up pics of the beach and the hike we did tomorrow or so.

Here's Carl checking a water hole before we went through.

This is one of the river's we had to drive through. Most of the tourists that go to Waipi'o have rental cars and can't make it down the steep drive into the valley, so they park their car at the top of the hill and hike down. When we drove through this river, and a few others, we had several people look at us like, "Do you seriously think you're going to make it through that?" I was never worried about getting stuck because I knew Carl wouldn't go through something he wasn't positive that we could make it through.

This is one of the waterfalls at the back of the valley. The mountain you see wraps all the way around the valley, but the road stops and the only way to get to the other valleys and rainforests along the coast is by foot. Carl and I had a Saint Paddy's Day party to get to later that night, so we were only able to do a mini-hike. But let me tell you, it was intense. We summited the cliff in the picture, and it was absolutely breathtaking, but rather difficult. There is another valley a 7.7 mile walk from Waipi'o that we're making plans to hike to and camp out at. It is completely uninhabited and has waterfalls and fresh water streams all throughout. We hear its unbelievable, and we can't wait to go.

There were several homes in the valley, which we were pretty surprised about. If you could see the road you have to go down to get there, you'd never believe that people live there. We did some research when we got home and found out that Waipi'o Valley used to be a bustling mecca of Hawaii. All of the Princes and elite of Hawaii had homes there, and much of the farming was done there as well. There was a school, a post office, a restaurant, a hotel, and a jail. Then, in the 40s, a huge tsunami hit Hawaii and completely wiped out the valley. It wasn't until very recently that people began moving back, and from what we hear they don't really care for tourists. We were pretty uncomfortable most of the time we were driving through the valley, for one because of the condition of the roads, but also because we felt like we were driving through people's property and someone was surely going to come out with a shotgun and run us off. Then we remembered we were in Hawaii not Texas, and our fears shifted to someone coming out with a koa wood club with shark teeth strung along the outside. As it turned out, though, everyone we came across was super nice and didn't seem to care that we were there at all.