The Nā Pali Coast is twenty-seven kilometres of Hawaiian shoreline with no road on it, on the north of Kauai, where green cliffs come out of the Pacific to 1,200 metres in pleated folds. The pleating is drainage written into rock. Runoff from the ridgetops splits into parallel streams, each cutting its own groove down the soft basalt, and repeated the length of the coast they give the walls their curtain-like face. Getting along them on foot means the Kalalau Trail, graded in the 1860s so pack animals could carry oranges, taro and coffee out of the valleys, its stone paving still holding the tread together. It crosses five valleys and brings you down to sea level only twice. Eleven kilometres along, it narrows into Crawler's Ledge, a bare traverse of the cliff face where most walkers slow to a shuffle. At the end is Kalalau Valley, a green amphitheatre opening to the sea, where several hundred people farmed terraced taro ponds for about a thousand years. Nobody is permitted to live there now.
From the rim at Kōkeʻe, high on the other side of the island, you look down almost a kilometre into that valley. When cloud spills over the ridgelines and parts again, the whole thing appears and disappears below you. The sea gives up a little more. Small rigid rafts can nose inside the caves at the base of the wall, while the big catamarans sit outside and look in. At Waiahuakua, the Double Door, a boat goes in one mouth and out of another while a waterfall drops through a hole in the roof. From December to April humpbacks pass in the channel underneath the cliffs. Only a helicopter gets you into the back of the hanging valleys, where waterfalls come out of the cloud onto ground nobody walks on. It also passes Honopū, a beach cut in two by a rock arch twenty-seven metres high, where no boat, kayak or aircraft may land — so the one lawful way onto that sand is to swim to it from open water.