The oddly positioned scene of the new arrivals encountering a Brachiosaurus (which renders the actual tour a bit anticlimactic) by the lagoon, is alongside Puu Ka Ele Reservoir on the Jurassic Kahili Ranch, a working cattle ranch covering 2,500 acres south of Kuhio Highway near Kilauea, on the island’s northeast tip.Īpart from the two sequels, The Lost World (1997) and Jurassic Park III (2001), the 1998 version of Mighty Joe Young, and the 2011 Adam Sandler comedy Just Go With It have also been filmed on the ranch land. Most of the Kauai helicopter tours will take you over the Manawaiopuna Falls in the Valley, where the film’s helipad was constructed. The Kaumualii Highway (50) will take you out to the Hanapepe Valley Lookout, but once again the best way to see it is from the air. It’s the Hanapepe Valley, to the east of Hanapepe town. The valley through which the ’copter continues can be found on the south of the island. Na Pali’s forbidding cliffs previously made it an ideal stand-in for the coast of ‘Skull Island’ in the 1976 version of King Kong. Otherwise, you can see the rugged terrain from a boat or helicopter tour. You can’t access the steep-sided valleys by vehicle, though the adventurous could negotiate the 11-mile trail from Ke’e Beach to Kalalau Valley.

The first views of ‘Isla Nublar’ from the helicopter are the green slopes of Kauai’s Na Pali Coast, to the west of the Limahuli Garden location on the north shore. The waterfront at Kapaa itself, on Kuhio Highway, was transformed into the outdoor cafe at ‘San Jose, Costa Rica’, where the avaricious Dennis Nedry ( Wayne Knight) gets paid to smuggle out dinosaur embryos in a shaving cream can. The falls are on public land but there’s short hike to find them. Supposedly in the ‘Dominican Republic’, the site of the ‘Mano de Dios Amber Mine’, where lawyer Gennaro ( Martin Ferrero) decides that a respected palaeontologist is needed on board, is also Kauai, alongside Hoopii Falls, on the Kapaa Stream at Kapaa, on the eastern side of the island. Since 1976, the garden has been one of the properties comprising the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and it’s open for tours.

The prologue, with one of the park’s staff falling prey to the unseen predator being loaded into a container, was filmed in Limahuli Garden, 5-8291 Kuhio Highway, at Hanalei, on Kauai’s northern coast.

You can find some spectacular landscapes here, but there are no dinosaur fossils. It’s not the Badlands of ‘Wyoming’ but a section of Red Rock Canyon State Park near Ridgecrest, in California’s Mojave Desert, accessible only to four-wheel drive vehicles.

Jurassic Park film location: the 'Wyoming' palaeontological dig: Red Rock Canyon, Ridgecrest, California | Photograph: wikimedia / Jean trans h+

Jurassic park the colony