Birds In Paradise

I got up this morning before the crack of dawn. I needed to get down to the Port Allen airport before 7:00 a.m. for my two hour powered hanglider flight all the way around Kaua'i.

When I pre-booked the flight a few weeks ago, I booked it for the 80 minute "lesson." But last night Jerry, the owner of Birds In Paradise, called me to say he had another client who wanted to go up for two hours. Since Jerry wanted to take two powered hangliders up on this day and fly together, he gave me a discount on the longer flight.

At first I was a little scared, as I'm not big on heights. But Jerry did a good job to calm my nerves, and I was still more at ease with this flying concept than I was with a helicopter. And as everyone says, you haven't seen Kaua'i until you've seen it by air.

Jim, the other customer, was fired up to get going. He was going to fly with Jerry the owner, and I was going up with Mark, an Aussie who told me he'd flown "trikes" (they have three wheels) in Australia, China and Thailand before getting to Hawaii.

Mark and Jerry prepared the trikes for departure. Part of that process included loading film in the cameras on the wings of the two trikes and a DVD on Jerry's trike which would record Jim's flight.

After we got into our flight suites and got strapped in, it was time to take off. We "taxied" down the runway and then after a brief call to air traffic control, Jerry and Mark let 'er rip. We were off the ground in no time. These things are light, and only go 80 mph at top speed.

After about 5-10 minutes, we were over Waimea Canyon. This place is amazingly similar to the Grand Canyon, only much smaller in scale, and there were several waterfalls (note picture below).























After exploring the canyon and getting in the face of waterfalls, we headed over to the Na'Pali coast.
























This was completely different from what I saw on my drive on Monday. Na'Pali is amazing, and Mark knew it. He flies over this place on a regular basis and you could tell he was enjoying himself as much as I was.

Our two hour flight went by fast. We cruised all the way around the island, seeing many amazing island formations as well as off shore reefs, pods of whales and beachcombers who would wave as we passed.

Any way you slice it, this experience was very cool.