Kauai Guide- Top 5 Places to See on the Garden Isle

6 min readDec 20, 2018

Kaua‘i is a unique place. People who visit here recognize this fact immediately. There are plenty of places in the world featuring sun and sea, but no other place offers the incomparable beauty, lushness and serenity of Kaua‘i.

We’ve put together a Kauai guide to the top 5 most popular places to visit and whether or not they are real gems on the island.

5. Na Pali Coast

If ever there was a place made for helicopter exploration, it’s Kaua‘i. Much of the island can be seen only by air, and helicopters, with their giant windows and their ability to hover, are by far the preferred method for most. Going to Kaua‘i without taking a helicopter flight is like going to see the Sistine Chapel and not looking up. You will see the ruggedly beautiful Na Pali Coast and marvel at the sheerness of some of its cliffs. This is an area where razor-thin, almost two-dimensional mountains rise parallel to each other, leaving impossibly tall and narrow valleys between them.

4. Po’ipu — Spouting Horn

This wonderful delight is a small lava shelf where water from waves is thrust through an opening, causing water and air to squirt out a blowhole. This particular site distinguishes itself from other blowholes around Hawai‘i in that it has an additional hole that blows only air, causing a loud moaning and gasping sound. Legend has it that the entire coastline in this area was once guarded by a giant female lizard called a mo‘o. She would eat anyone who tried to swim or fish in the area. One day a man named Liko went fishing. The mo‘o went to attack Liko, who threw a spear into the mo‘o’s mouth. The angry mo‘o chased Liko into the lava tube. Liko escaped, but the mo‘o became trapped in what we now call Spouting Horn, where its cries of hunger and pain can be heard to this day.

3. Tunnels Beach

The road after Hanalei is closed through the summer. You won’t be able to access this beach (except by boat/kayak) until the road is open to the public. There is no firm date yet of when that will be but the end of 2018 is probably a fair estimate.

One of Kaua‘i’s snorkeling nirvanas. This superb beach has a wide-fringing reef that is so large it can be seen from space. There is often a lateral rip current, but it’s normally quite weak, making Tunnels a good snorkeling spot most of the time. The beach is quite popular, and you will often see scuba divers here, as well as surfers and windsurfers. All this makes it sound crowded, but a lack of street parking keeps the numbers relatively low. The kaleidoscope of underwater life is usually profuse and definitely worth your time to explore.

2. Wailua Falls

In ancient times (and as recently as 2016, which you can see on YouTube), men would jump off the top of the falls to prove their manhood (which was often left on the rocks below). This test can be fatal. Government maps list the falls’ height at 80 feet. That always bothered us because it sure looks taller. So, a while back we dropped a fishing line and sinker to the bottom from the lip of the falls (boy, did we look stupid) and measured it. To our amazement, it was 173 feet of solid drop. (We measured it twice to be sure.) That’s actually taller than Niagara Falls, though the latter has a tad more water flowing.

1. Waimea Canyon

Waimea Canyon is a spectacular gorge that defies description. Island legend states that when Mark Twain was here, he dubbed it “the Grand Canyon of the Pacific.” (Unfortunately, when you read his biography, you find that when he visited Hawai‘i, he never set foot on Kaua‘i. Oops, there goes another urban legend.) The canyon lookout is an awesome vista. At one time three rivers, fed from the island’s center by the Alaka‘i Swamp on Mt. Wai‘ale‘ale, all ran down the gently sloping shield volcano, emptying into the ocean at separate points like the spokes of a wheel. That’s what created the now-dry valleys you see on your way out to Polihale. When a fault caused the collapse of part of the volcano’s flank, the three rivers were forced to combine as they ran down into the fault. This new, opportunistic river carved a place for itself in the splintered and fractured lava flows. The results are extraordinary.

These descriptions are all excerpts from the Kauai section of our Hawaii Revealed App, to give you a taste of what’s out there. As you consider what you want to do and where you want to stay — hotel or condo, by the beach or with a mountain view — you might find it intimidating to wade through the vast number of choices and wish you had a comprehensive Kauai guide. So here’s what we did. We have personally reviewed every resort on Kauai. We have exhaustively cataloged all the amenities, formed opinions on what different properties have to offer and created comprehensive reviews. Sure, you can go online and look at reviews by people who have been to one or maybe two resorts. But none of those sources knows them all and can compare one to the other.

For instance, you might say, I want a hotel in East Kauai, on a beach, that’s good for families, has an outdoor lanai, a children’s pool, and takes service animals. Oh, and a swim-up bar would be nice. With the filters in our app, you can cut through the 76 or so resorts and get to exactly what you want by reading our in-depth, brutally honest review. How’s that for cutting through the noise?