Kualoa Ranch

While in Oahu, my sister and I went on a trail ride through Kualoa Ranch.

Kualoa is a private nature reserve and working cattle ranch. It’s also a very popular filming site and has appeared in films such as Jurassic Park, Pearl Harbor, The Hunger Games and 50 First Dates… to name just a few. 🙂

While they offer multiple tours, my sister and I signed up for the 2 hour horseback ride.

The horse I rode was named Gryffindor… I can never remember trail horse names but I know I won’t have a problem with this one, haha. 🙂

I was happy I was allowed to take my camera during the ride, but since I’m not a very experienced rider I ended up randomly taking pictures and hoped for the best. A lot of my shots are blurry, aimed at the sky (or ground) or at weird angles, but I did manage to get some decent ones.

The valley itself was amazing. My photos don’t do it justice. 😛

There’s a tiny Jurassic Park sign in the middle of this one. The tree is different, but this is the spot where this scene was filmed:

I’ve mentioned before that Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies, so this was exciting. 😀 We also went through the gate in this scene from Jurassic World:

And passed by some (rather poorly) covered movie props, for a film currently in production. They looked very familiar… just saying… 😉

My parents were able to take a different tour through another area of the ranch, where they got to visit the Indominus Rex cage. We didn’t pass by that but gahhh! So cool!

We also passed by a bunch of cattle…

And looped back around to see the ocean again:

All in all this was a really fantastic tour with wonderful guides. I highly recommend it if you’re ever out visiting the islands – it’s totally worth it! Here is their website and Facebook page if you want to check them out. 🙂