A Helicopter Tour of Kauai - Bucket List Item Number 1

 You haven't been to Kauai, and you haven't taken a helicopter tour? What in blue blazes are you waiting for? This needs to be at the top of everyone's bucket list. No fooling, you simply must get out to the island, book your tour, and take a helicopter trip around the most beautiful, enchanting, awe inspiring place on earth. Stop reading this and call your travel agent, now!

Okay, I'm a bit biased; I actually flew Kauai tours for several years, and in the interest of full disclosure, I flew for a company called Air Kauai. So of course I have a different perspective on helicopters, and flying around islands in them. I'm going to attempt to share with you, dear reader, why it is that you simply must drop whatever other vacation plans you may have, get a ticket to Lihue, and hop aboard a tour helicopter. You can go to Orlando, or Branson, or the Catskills next year.

Here's why you need to do this, what helicopter company you should consider, how much it might cost, what to take along, and what time of year and time of day to go. Plus a few extras: what to expect on the helicopter tour, what you might see, a safety overview, and other odds and ends to make your life-altering experience even more gratifying. Let's start with getting to Kauai, and a bit of the island's mystique, beginning, as they say, at the beginning, the origin of Kauai.

Kauai, or the Garden Island, is the furthest (exposed) northwest island in the Hawaiian chain. I say exposed because the Hawaiian Islands are slowly disappearing. No, this isn't a reason to move your trip up a few weeks, relax. Here's a bit of Hawaiian trivia that some of your tour mates likely won't know. There are in fact 127 islands in the Hawaiian chain, not just the seven you see on a map today--Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Oahu, Kauai, and Niihau. The Hawaiian chain stretches across the Pacific for 1,200 miles, ending in a little coral atoll called Kure, which is, in fact, the very first Hawaiian Island, dating back nearly 100 million years. As a reference, one of the Hawaiian Islands is a little place called Midway which is located, well, mid way across the chain, about 600 miles Northwest of Oahu.

All the islands are volcanic in origin. Their source is a volcanic rift in the ocean floor called the Hawaiian Emperor vent, which lies deep under water seventy miles south and east of Hawaii, the so-called 'Big Island'. Over the last 100 million years this volcanic vent has created all 127 islands*. The islands break the surface, develop into a land mass, cool sufficiently to support life forms, and then, due to wind, water and natural corrosive factors, they slowly erode away, sinking back below the waves. The islands are also located directly on a tectonic plate with a northwesterly drift, which takes them off toward Japan and Asia over their lifetimes. Each Hawaiian island actually moves Northwest about half an inch per year. Geologists claim that Kure, for instance, will, in a few dozen million years end up parked near the Kamchatka peninsula.

Kauai itself is about 7 million years old. Its specific origin, the volcano that created the land mass called Kauai, is today called Mount WaiAleAle (Why-Olly-Olly). WaiAleAle sits in the middle of the island. Go to Google Earth and type that in, and see where it takes you. More about this mountain later, during your tour.

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