Thursday, July 19, 2007

Our Best Footage Yet

This post is a little late in the making because I have been extremely busy with work and extremely lazy with posting on this blog. Now that we have just over 4 weeks before we heard back home, I need to get off my lazy behind and talk about all of the cool things we have done over the last couple of weeks.

Jessica spoke of our 10 mile hike with grace and eloquence so I will do the exact opposite and describe it with the mind and maturity of a 13 year old boy. Kudos to Rob and Alissa who handled the hike with relative ease even though they have never been hiking on Kauai. The hiking here is much different from the East Coast in that many sections of the trail are literally on the side of a cliff and if you take the wrong step, your significant other better hope that you didn't make your life insurance policy null and void. This hike had drops of over 25oo feet (half a mile) so we had to be extra careful in certain spots.

Below is some video that I took at the top of the Nuololo Valley along the Na Pali coast. I'm new to this whole video thing but with the help of my better half, I was able to lay one of my favorite groups, Air, over the footage. Let me know what you think.





You probably saw the picture of Jessica holding on to some gravel for dear life and me taking a picture of her. The next picture is the shot that I got. Having 2 cameras around definitely opens up a whole new window of opportunity.

The hike wasn't too bad in that there weren't many steep inclines or declines but it was long and there were parts where you had to literally push through 6-7 foot high plants and shrubs. Alissa was the only one smart enough to wear long pants so the rest of us were rewarded with scratches all over our legs.

The hike was extremely bad in that it started to rain pretty hard for the last 2 1/2 miles. It got progressively muddier and colder and there were markers every quarter mile. At certain points it felt like we ran a marathon and I would look up to see that we had gone only 400 meters. Someone up there had to be laughing at us. To make matters worse, we were going to have to walk 1 1/2 miles on the road back to our car and within 25 feet of starting this trek, a torrential downpour hit us.

Jessica was on the other side of the road and she put a thumb out in the 1% chance that someone would pick up a soaking wet, filthy hiker. Sure enough, a pickup truck stopped. My guess is that if Rob, Alissa and me were on the same side of the road as her, the guy would have kept driving. But he saw a lonesome girl trudging along and felt pity. He must have been shocked when he saw three more dirty hikers darting for his car. I felt like we were sneaking into the country illegally as I dove face-first into the bed of the pick-up. For the first time in my life I can say that sitting in the back of a pick-up in a torrential downpour was the highlight of my day.


In the second part of this video, you see what appears to be a fly.That my friends, is a helicopter.It gives you some perspective - this valley is enormous!


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