Kapena Falls

Last Saturday (I always seem to do things on Saturdays) a very large group, about 12 of us, went to Kapena Falls. We left in the afternoon and hopped on the bus. As usual our trip to get where we were going was not that short. We got to downtown Honolulu and waited for our bus connection for about 30min until we realized that the #4 bus didn't pick up at our bus stop. We called TheBus and they told us to walk down 2 blocks and then up 1. We did and then had to wait for another 50min because we'd just missed our bus by about 10min. Whoops.
When we finally got on our bus, the bus driver asked one of the guys where we were headed. So he told him a waterfall and the bus driver said that there are no waterfalls where we were headed. There really is but we decided that he was just keeping the "tourists" from finding a really good spot. This waterfall, you just wouldn't know it was there because it's in such an odd place. We went up Nuuanu Ave. past a rather large cemetery, until we saw the Honolulu Community Church. That was our stop. Everyone piled off the bus and followed Ben and Rob down the driveway of the church until they abruptly stepped off of it into a wood compost heap, then continued on through a ton of underbrush. I can tell you that everyone was thinking "where the hell are you taking us??"
Then we arrived at a chain link fence with a hole just big enough in it for us to squeeze through. I threw down my backpack and climbed through only to be confronted with a rather steep embankment with lots of sneaky vines and roots that grabbed at my feet while I tried to go down. I finally made it and we tromped through a lot more brush until we saw it up ahead.
The waterfall itself isn't very big, just a grouping of rocks with water that flows down the sides. There is also a huge pool right underneath it and it's really really hard to touch bottom. If you're facing the waterfall there is a 40ft wall of rock that is right above the pool that you can throw yourself off of into the water.
Immediately everyone stripped off their clothes down to their swimsuits and ran up the steep side of the hill to get to the top of the jumping rock. Well, everyone except for me and 2 other girls. We decided to wait it out and see how we felt about jumping because it was really high. I'm rather terrified of heights if I know I have to jump them so I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it off the rock. The feeling of dropping in my stomach is not pleasant and neither is the rush of adrenaline because it makes me feel rather icky. Adrenaline in an exciting situation, good! Adrenaline in a scary jumpingoffrockstomydeath situation, bad.
I ended up taking pictures of everyone and their mother jumping off and pretty soon I decided to climb up and see what all the hype was about. This was my first mistake. I got to the top and I realized just how high it was. You see it didn't look that bad from the bottom so I figured maybe I really could get up, not look over, run, and make a speactacular flying leap out into the abyss before gracefully landing in the water below. HAHAHA! Yea right. I crept to the edge and looked over. That was my second mistake. While I was standing there looking over, one of the guys launched himself off and I had to watch him all the way down. The fall was so long that he had time to flail his arms around like a frightened bug before he splashed down. I backed off very quickly and spent about 10min wrestling with my better judgement about jumping until it won out and I climbed back down the side of the hill to jump off of a tamer rock about 8ft high.
The rest of the day was spent swimming in the pool, watching people jump off the rock, watching people use the rope swing and swing super high then drop doing flips and dives, and sitting in the waterfall. Like I said earlier, it was pretty small but powerful. Some of the guys were sitting in it letting it run down over them and they invited me to give it a try. They helped me down and told me where to sit, insisted that I lie back into the water, and in the process I almost lost my bikini top and bottoms! The water was really strong flowing over the rocks and when it hit my body it was with a lot of downward force. Downward force + bikini = potential disaster. I was holding on for dear life and after a while I decided that a show would be inappropriate so I got out ;)
One of the girls, Jennifer, showed up a little later. She decided that she would give the giant rock a chance and climbed up to the top. By the time Jasmine, Colby, Ben and I left about 30min later, she was still up there debating the wisdom of her idea.
After we left, we decided that the four of us were dying of starvation so it was time to go get some grub. Plate lunch sounded good so we went to Rainbow, a little hole-in-the-wall that serves the best plate lunch you'll ever have. For those of you that have never heard of/eaten plate lunch it's the most fattening thing you'll eat in a while. It's 2 scoops of white rice, a ton of macaroni salad swimming in mayo, and whatever fried/bbq'd/cooked meat you wanna eat with it. I had the mahi mahi and by the time I was done I could hardly move. However, Ben decided that all we needed now was a malasada to top things off. He then proceeded to drag us about 25min more down the street to Leonard's bakery.
Malasadas are kind of hard to explain if you've never eaten one but I'll try. They're like little round puffs of donut dough with custard filling, fried, and then rolled in granulated sugar. They have different fillings or they can just be that dough fried alone, but they're good. Oh So GOOD. And they're cheap, about 80 cents each! Needless to say I could only eat one after that huge fried meal. It was a good thing that we had a niiice long walk ahead of us before we made it home or I would've felt like even more of a pig than I did :)