16th August 2016

Nawiliwili, Kaua’I Cluody but no rain Temp a pleasant 27c

Our tour today was to the McBryde & Atherton Gardens which are now run by the National Tropical Botanical Garden people. We were due to leave at 9.30am but there was a little delay which we found out later was because the bus we were going on got held up due to road works. We had to go down the same road and were held up again for quite a while. There is only this one single lane road across the island and they were doing something to the barriers causing one lane to be blocked. The bus we went in was a mini bus and there was only 17 of us on it. The bus actually belongs to the Gardens and was driven by David who works full time for them. He was our driver and guide and he is very knowledgeable on plants, trees etc. We had a very good tour complete with a nice lunch in a gazebo in the gardens. The gardens were first planted by the Atherton & McBryde families but have since become one of the NTBG gardens. The NTBG are the only botanical garden chartered by the U.S. Congress. Established in 1964, the Garden is dedicated to the preservation and survival of tropical plants, emphasizing rare and endangered species. The gardens are not formal gardens like Butchart Gardens in Canada but are more like rain forests. As usual there was too much information for me to remember it all but one piece of information which stuck in my mind was that plants are not always kind to each other and are often quite hostile. For instance, the strangler fig tree kills off other trees, Eucalyptus trees give off some chemical which eventually kills of all other trees around it, some plants are becoming extinct because of being attacked by other plants. To preserve some of these endangered species is the Garden’s mission. This island is being overrun by wild chickens, they are everywhere and our guide asked us to take some of them away with us on the ship. As we had a very late lunch we did not go to dinner in the dining room tonight but instead went to the Horizon Court later on. Tonight’s entertainment was a second show of Doug Cameron a violinist. His last show was good but we did not feel like going to see him again so we stayed in the cabin to watch some port talks which we have missed.