Kaua'i Coffee and Poipu Beach

We started the day by going out for breakfast. John had been making our breakfast most mornings, and he'd discovered a little cafe that was only open for breakfast and lunch in the second story of one of the buildings in our little town, and they had some intriguing specials. 

So we woke up and walked over to the Olympic Cafe.

We shared an omelet with Luau Pork, cheese, potatoes, and topped with a tomatillo sauce. It was served with home fries, and it was well worth getting. Most of the daily specials menu was what we'd been cooking for ourselves and eating all our fruit for probably a tenth the price of the restaurant food. 

But the luau pork was super tender, the omelet itself was beautifully made, the eggs were tender and perfectly cooked. The melted cheese added richness, and the tomatillo salsa was tart and lovely. The home fries were good and garlicky, but I wished they'd crisped them better. Still... it was good, and the waitress was generous with the coffee. 

The best part was that half of it filled each of us perfectly well. It was so much meat that it really satisfied my protein need and sent us on our way for our morning and afternoon adventures, because we had two planned visits from scouting earlier: the Kaua'i Coffee Plantation and we wanted to go to Poipu Beach to see the green sea turtles and actually see the sunset over the sea. 

On the way we went by the Lihue Farmer's Market and just a big further from there we found this old diverted and dammed fish pond that had been built by the first settlers here. It was quite a feat of engineering, and was entirely beautiful. 

We wanted to get malasadas, too, and on the way back to Lihue, I asked John to take me back to the market and I bought some Hibiscus fruit, which I had no idea how to use, but I'd never get the chance to get it again, which isn't always the best reason to get something, but I've eaten Trader Joe's dried, candied hibiscus and I've been drinking Hibiscus tea for so long, and it turns out it's the fruit, not the flower that is used for the tea! 

So this is a picture of our haul for the day, including another two fruit stands that we wandered by, as John had found them on Google. The hibiscus fruit are on the right, and as you might expect, steeping them in boiling water makes for a really excellent hibiscus tea, they're supposed to be good for making jam and jellies as well, but I do not have that equipment here. The mangos at the bottom are the same Keitt ones that we had the other morning, we found more. 

The little brown nut like things are longan, Dragon's Eye, a fruit with a leathery skin, translucent white flesh and a big shiny seed. The bananas are ice cream bananas, not the usual cloned variety, they're bigger, fatter, creamier. They don't travel well, but they're so good. 

Yes, we love fresh fruit while we're here, and we eat a lot of it instead of desserts, usually, and after most of our meals. It's way cheaper to get it a the farmers' markets and grocery stores than it is at a restaurant, but that's normal. Still, I feel a little guilty getting the hibiscus since I can't take full advantage of the fresh fruit. 

We went back to the Kaua'i Bakery to get more malasadas, John got a regular cinnamon sugar one and I got a haupia (coconut milk thickened with jello) one with a bit of cream as well. We brought them along with us out to Kaua'i Coffee. The plantation tours are 25 dollars a person, but they only do them on the weekdays, but there's a small, self-guided walking tour that's just around the gift shop.

We got there, got some sample coffee, ate our malasadas, and then went on the self-guided tour. It was really cool, honestly, as they have a whole experimental garden of coffee trees all around the gift store. 

The common cultivar here was the one that's been grown on Kona for quite some time, and Kaua'i Coffee has been expanding their cultivars to include three different Brazilian ones, and one from Blue Mountain. Blue Mountain coffee is grown in Jamaica, in an environment that is much like the Hawaiian ones, if it's up in the Waimea Valley, which starts at 5000 feet. Yes, that's on this island. But having an environment that matches the cultivar's natural setting is the first step to getting it to take here. 

That said... they were selling one of the Brazilian coffees for $50 a pound in the gift shop, and when John asked about green beans, they were only selling that one for $28 a pound and only in a five pound bag. When I tasted the sample of it from the sampling bar, it was, as most Hawaiian coffees, truly mild, with no characteristic flavors at all, just a super mild acid and spice to it. So we didn't buy that. It also turned out that the plantation had been sold in the early 2000's to an international coffee conglomerate, which made the experimentation easy. 

We wandered after that, found me a SPAM musubi at a convenience store after checking nearly half a dozen of them. One of the places we checked was the Right Slice, and bought a slice of lilikoi cheesecake for way later. I did NOT need more sugar, but we found it and headed over to Poipu, where we shopped a bit and then at about 4 pm headed for Poipu beach. There was this one seal out on the beach, with a lot of orange cones warning people away from him. 

There were three groupings of turtles. 

One out on an island, across the bay that was filled with swimmers, snorkelers, and watched over by the lifeguards and volunteer guards. 

These were pretty happy and isolated from the chaos enough that they weren't being bothered by anyone. 

There was another group right in the middle of the easiest access to the deep water via the beach. Going any other way involved going over some pretty awful rock beaches. 

The turtles knew what was up, and this sand way was easy for them to get up onto the beach through. And they just basked there while they were completely surrounded by tourists. 

There were lovely cones everywhere marking the distance you were supposed to keep, but right when we got there, this girl walked right past the cones to "get her picture" and three different people cheerfully told her to get back over the line. She ignored them all, but eventually got out. 

Admittedly, they were pretty photogenic. 

John has a very good zoom on his phone's camera. 

We mostly just hung out. Walking over to a stony outcropping, and studying the black crabs, and just experiencing the ocean for a while. That's the only thing we really miss in Colorado: the ocean. 

It was great just being able to sit with a tidal pool, to look at all the anemone, the crabs, and the bubbles that came up out from between the rocks every time the water hit the far shore. It was amazing to just soak it all in. Then, when the sun started heading for the horizon we headed for the far beach and found the third grouping of turtles, just two of them on another sunny spot, protected by cones, and in the middle of bunch of people sitting out to watch the sunset over the water. 

If you click on the photo you can see the turtles behind their cones. 

We all enjoyed the sunset. 

I think John and I had nearly thirty photos of the sunset and the surfers who were right along the way to the sun. There were some huge waves much further out, probably a shelf or something out there that was making the waves break.

When then sun went down, we headed to a nearby restaurant at the beach parking lot and found that they had a forty minute wait, so we headed inland, in a sudden downpour to Kinama Ramen. I was craving noodle soup, especially as the rain poured all around us as we headed quickly into the open air mall. 

The Ramen shop had the usual suspects of char sui ramen, miso ramen, etc. But they also had udon, and one caught my eye, which was the Kitsune Udon. Kitsune are fox spirits in Japanese lore, and they love fried tofu pockets, i.e. inari. I love inari, too. The inari used for sushi is marinated in a sweet and sour and salty marinade; but fresh, it's just a pocket of protein that will soak up anything it's put in. 

In this case, it was put in a beautifully savory dashi with a nice blob of white wasabi and green onions on top. It was so good. The broth was piping hot, and the udon was tender, chewy, and lovely. 

Well satisfied, we headed home in the rain. The hot tub was great in the rain, and I felt good enough to write both the last two days up. So I'm actually caught up. So grateful you're following along.