4:37 PM here. 81. Sunny. Clear. Just another…
Kate and I just got back from a trip to Waimea Canyon. Clear this time.
Along the way we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company Visitor Center and Museum. Talk about underwhelming. And not just because I shifted to tea a while back.
The video explained how they took a 3,400 acre sugarcane farm with 400 workers and transformed it into a coffee estate with the same acreage and only 57 workers. The magic ingredient? Mechanization. They have designed mechanical pickers and pruners. The pruners are necessary because the pickers can only pick coffee berries at 4+ feet and below. With the mechanization they can harvest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is, I got the impression, a good thing. Fertilization, on Kauai’s rich volcanic soil, and irrigation, because Kauai’s rains come at an inconvenient time of year, winter, round out the why did I stop here in the first place list.
We also stopped at Waimea Plantation Cottages for lunch. We stayed there in 1998 and Kate has not forgotten a significant fact. NO air conditioning. When asked if they were air conditioned, our waiter looked bemused, “No. No AC. You have to go to a hotel for that. Or, you could stay in the cabins up in Kokee State Park.”
Which reminds me that when Kate needed meds late in the evening, I asked the concierge whether there was a 24-hour pharmacy. She looked at me with another bemused expression and said, “This is Hawai’i.”
Waimea Canyon had its on prettiest 5.1 million year old face today. Red cliffs, sinuous streams and water falls so thin they get buffeted by the wind. We drove on to the Kalalau lookout, near the end of the road, got out and went over to the railing which looks down into the Kalalau valley. Ancient Hawai’ians lived there and in the 60’s and 70’s so did back-to-the-land types. The state moved them out a while ago.
Spectacular doesn’t described this lookout. Knife edged walls of eroded stone creat a u-shaped valley with a beach and ocean view at the northern end and a steep 2,000 foot cliff face at the southern. The lookout is atop this cliff so the view shows the valley below and the Pacific stretched out to the horizon. It is in this valley where much of the Jurassic Park movies were filmed.
We’re back now for the evening and night, then we check out tomorrow morning.
