Our route to the cave reserve took us through the Tree Tunnel, which was a grand gateway, as cited by this website.
We had a short walk from where we parked to the view of the ocean.
And then we took an interpretive hike to get to the Makauwahi Cave. There were many informative signs about the flora.
Our first sighting of Makauwahi Cave came from above. As you can see, it ‘s not as much of a cave as it once was.
We had to crawl through a tunnel (for about four feet) to get on the inside.
Once in, we wandered right into a tour that was just starting and learned that the cave roof collapsed 7000 years ago and formed a lake. From the fossil record in what was the lake comes information about what species were on the island prior to contact.
There’s a bit of cave left and we got to see the patterns the limestone made.
There were also a lot of great spiders hanging out on the native plants, including this one who was going to eat well soon.
