Roosters and Cliffs

While waiting, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, for a rental car at the Kauai airport, I wondered foolishly why someone would bring their pet rooster to work at the outdoor car rental counter. (Maybe the noisy little bugger escaped and was enjoying the airport scenery, or something.) As it turns out, roosters own the island of Kauai. Locals and tourists pay rent in the form of unguarded food scraps at the public parks. Campers, beware: every morning, and evening, and all hours of the night, these roosters traded their cock-a-doodle-doos, asserted their dominance over my breakfast, and chased each other all over the beach in an elaborate mating dance that I never quite figured out.

Backpacking on the Na Pali Coast afforded stunning (albeit terrifying) views of the coastline and record-breaking surf, "trails" that are really just little jokes on a cliff, and a close encounter with the snorts of wild boar at 4:30am. I suggested, naively, that the mountain goats were mating, and my more experienced traveling companion thoughtfully withheld the truth until the light of day.

It was only then that I learned about their tusks.