Exploring more Niue

We spent this morning catching up on school stuff then taking warm showers on shore. Rain is coming in a day or two, so we decided to do our second rental car day again today. So this afternoon we headed out. First to Avaiki Cave, our favorite! Where at low tide you can swim in a pool under the cave, and jump from the sides into the pool. To top it off, we picked up ice cream for snack to eat when we got there. It was great!!

Then we headed to Limu Pools. A beautiful, giant tide pool that you can swim in. There are areas with cold fresh water mixing in with warmer sea water causing temperature inversions that you can see in the water as you are snorkeling. Lots of reefs and fish and even a gorgeous blue star fish! Then we went to the second pool where Cassidy and Wolfie were jumping from cliffs. I swam through an arch and on my return trip a sea snake was coming almost right up at me. We've heard they are venomous, but rarely or never bite. I reached out and pet him. I felt a bit bad, they have to come up about every 2 hours for air. When I pet him, he went diving straight down again. Guess air wasn't that critical to him. 

Then we headed to Palaha Cave, which was excellent. We hit it as the sun was going down. It's a great cave facing out at the ocean. We were facing west and the sunset and nice light was coming in through the cave. We did some great exploring and took lots of pictures. This cave has tons of staligmites and stalactites in it which we could see huge ones and little new ones forming. The boys of course loved climbing everything also. 

We came home for a quick dinner since we were an hour and a half after our normal dinner time. Then bananas with hershey syrup for dessert since we have a huge stalk of bananas that have all ripened at the same time (and are perfect right now!) The end of a great day, but have to get some rest because tomorrow's another day and we have the car until 1:30 tomorrow afternoon, so have to do all we can in the morning for exploring. 

This has been one of our more favorite islands for exploring and we're loving getting out and doing it!! 

Probably heading to Tonga sometime this weekend, depending on weather.

Shannon