The Nā Pali Coast has no road along it at all. For 27 kilometres on the northwest edge of Kauai, green cliffs rise straight from the Pacific to as much as 1,200 metres, and the only ways in are by boat, by helicopter or on foot. The walls are pleated — folded into deep vertical grooves like a hanging curtain — with a thin waterfall sliding down almost every crease. Ridge tops vanish into cloud, and between the ridges the land opens into hanging valleys that run back into the island. Kauai is the oldest of the main Hawaiian islands, and this coast is what five million years of weather does to a volcano. Inland, the summit of Waiʻaleʻale catches some of the heaviest rainfall on Earth, and all that water has been cutting the valleys back year after year. In Hawaiian, nā pali means simply the high cliffs, a name that needs no explaining once you stand under them.
The three ways in show you three different coasts. The Kalalau Trail runs 17 kilometres from Keʻe Beach along crumbling cliff edges, dropping into hidden valleys before it reaches Kalalau, where Hawaiian families farmed taro on terraced slopes until the last of them left around 1919. From a boat you slip beneath the ridges into sea caves, some with roofs collapsed open to the sky, often trailed by spinner dolphins. Humpback whales pass offshore from December to April. From a helicopter the whole wall unfolds at once, and nothing else shows it whole. The ocean turns violent in winter, so boats run mainly from May to September, when the water lies calm enough to enter the caves.