Scouting the North Shore

Planning...

So today was the day we decided to scout the whole of the North Shore, just heading north from our base and going as far as it was possible to go. Kaua'i is like most of the islands here, i.e. an island with a road around it, and a few roads that go up to the top of the mountain in the middle of the island. The road around this particular island, though, isn't a closed ring. The shaping and wear on the mountains to the north cut deep valleys between ridges, and the roads get less and less possible to make the more they try to cross the deep cut valleys from the wear of the water that falls constantly on the top of the mountain.  Both Kaua'i and Hawai'i are shaped that way. Not so much Maui or some of the other islands. 

But that means that there is an End of the Road going either way along the ring around Kaua'i. And to day we went North. 

After a solid breakfast of an egg, a couple slices of sausage, a single slice of toast, two spoonfuls of plain yogurt with a good number of pineapple chunks, we started by walking north, first, just up the beach to see what was there. It was the back of the front line of Kapa'a that had all the tourist shops. There was this cute little driftwood sign on the beach. It was one of those steep beaches where the water slaps into the sand like up at Barking Sands. It's really sharp reports of water. It didn't look particular safe or fun to swim in, but with the waves breaking so close to the shore, it would be easy to get past the wave breaks quickly into relatively flat water. 

I dunno if I'll go swimming in live water here, but the condo is beautifully outfitted with snorkles, so we may take the snorkles down south into calmer waters to find turtles. 

Our first stop was Kilauea Point, a National Wildlife Refuge, with both a lighthouse and lots and lots of birds. 

Just as we popped out of our car right at the point, a girl was cheerfully showing her mother a giant spider that made her mother jump, yelp, and shudder all over. It was absolutely huge, and it was so well hidden that anyone could have stumbled right into it in the bushes. 

John, of course, got his phone right out as soon as he understood what they were talking about and got a pretty spectacular shot. I did get a good look, but that was as close as I wanted to get. So it was cool that John wanted to get photo.

The park itself was actually closed for the day, and we found that quite a lot of things were closed on Mondays. It's good to have a day off, but in this case we saw a lot of park workers in safety bright clothing working on the trails and parking lots in there. The signs out in the parking lot said that entry required reservations, but that they often had time slots between noon and three were often still available. The view out to the light house was amazing, and it would be interesting to be out there to get shots of the beaches to the north and south. 

There were birds on the cliff just under the parking lot, and they were pretty comfortable there, not taking any mind of the people watching them. The odd thing is that these birds lived in burrows, and it was the oddest think seeing a bird duck its head and shuffle into a burrow, take a circle around and settle into the dirt. 

I'm glad that they're all well enough protected to not be wary of the tourists. 

We got all the information we needed to make the trip another day and get out to the point. 

There were a few shops we stopped at on the way up to Hanalea. We were looking for fresh fruit and found mango and passionfruit as well as some local art on cards. We also stopped at several historical spots that had turned into high end tourist shopping areas that left me cold. There were coffee shops that I really disliked. A market that looked like they'd imported everything to sell at a 300% markup. I had to walk right out again when the Kona coffee there had been roasted in Portland...

Just going across the street we found more of the actual local businesses, with more reasonable price tags. And we found the Kilauea Bakery and Pizzeria, which had a Baker's Laulau that had pork and ti leaves in a lovely pastry crust as well as gorgeous lemon bars and what they called an ube mochi. We ate the Laulau right there as a snack and kept going. 

By noon we'd made it out to Hanalei, which is, as you might have guessed, a town on the edge of Hanalei Bay, famous for a certain Magic Dragon, whom we didn't see, but the bay itself was beautiful, and the town had been updated to include a tourist mall similar to others around the island. The cool thing was the old maze of restaurants, shops, and tourist curios and snack shacks that were the historic front line for the tourists that made it this far along the road. 

We wandered through, looking again for local coffee and found a bakery that sold coffees from a local roaster that included coffees that had been grown on Kona and also here on Kauai. There's actually a plantation called Kauai Coffee, that's located on the south and west side of the island.  I was getting hungry at this point, so we decided on going to Hanalei Poke.

We weren't disappointed, either, as it was a really simple shop that does nothing but poke and tells you to trust them in that they'll pick the freshest local fish. You only get to pick the base and how they prepare it. We went with the local prep with pepper chili sauce, the usual mix ins of avocado, mango, sesame seeds, green onions, and inamona, which is a prep of roasted kukui nuts. Most modern poke recipes substitute macadamia nuts instead as they're more accessible. 

It was delicious. The rice was still hot. The sauces were amazing, and the mix of textures, flavors and everything was amazing. It didn't hurt that they also carried the Kauai Kombucha, which was a very low sugar (or the kombucha mother ate all the sugar out of it) drink that was super fizzy and tasty with lots of local fruits and teas. There turned out to be an outlet within a ten minute walk from where we were staying as well. 

From there it was a fairly close drive to the end of the road. There's a state park at the end along with another botanical preserve. Both require reservations and I think we know what we'll be doing another day.

The surprise, for me at least, was the cave just a little before the end of the road. I remembered the cave from thirty years ago. It's a dry cave that used to be used for storing all kinds of things by the locals, and it was something I remembered visiting back then; but I remembered is as being on the West side of the island, not the East. I remembered a beach, but it was Barking Sands Beach, not the actual beach that was there, with a typical lifeguard tower on the sand. 

It was so odd to have my memory be so different from reality; but it's something that I'm getting used to having happen. I just adjust my memories, as I'd rather be better attached to reality. 

But it was good to get to the end of the line.

We turned back at the end, though, as we didn't have reservations. And we went to Maniniholo Dry Cave instead. The cave was pretty much as I did remember it, wide, dark, with a back area that got shorter and shorter, and one had to watch the ceiling to not bump ones head against the stones. 

The cool thing, though, was that this time we saw a family coming out of the way back of the cave, waving their flashlight phones. So this time John and I were able to take our celphones and go even further back into the cave than we did before. Back then we didn't have cell phones. That was funny to realize. 

It was great being able to go back in there and actually take pictures not only of being in there but with John's better dark light camera, getting to take pictures out from there into the light coming from Haena Beach.

The beach was fabulous. Lots of the big Northern waves crashing like crazy much further out and then breaking again at the shoreline. There were stone barriers along the west shore of the bay, protected and so calm, a mom was sitting partially in the water while her two toddler girls played beside her. And just at the mouth of the bay, there were surfers competing on HUGE waves that flew banners of mist behind walls of water that were multiple stories high.

What a difference in character a few hundred feet made was amazing. 

The walk was amazing. 

We both had a blast getting out to a point where John could use his phone to get these photos of the outer waves. The beach was mostly sand, but some crusts of it was tidepool stone, some of it with bright red bits of plant life growing on it. 

There were giant spider lilies out there as well, where the earth met the sand, and since I'm painting them for class this Friday, I had to get some pictures of those as well. 

By the time we were done with the beach, I was pretty much done with scouting the North Shore. There was just one stop we had to make, which was at an overlook that we drove by without realizing what it was until we were past it! So this times we stopped to get a good shot of it. 

That was worth doing. 

Once we got back to the condo we unpacked, relaxed a bit, and then ate our goodies from the bakery. 

This was my ube mochi. If you've heard of butter mochi, this was pretty much it, and it's a good relative of the red bean sticky rice cake that I make most Lunar New Years. Butter, milk, and rice flour along with some sugar and plenty of eggs. This one wasn't too sweet, either, had the butter popcorn flavor of ube, and was topped with unsweetened coconut flakes. So good. 

After our treats we put on our walking shoes and walked into Kapa'a and shopped as we went. It was really fun to just go to the shops that were mere blocks from us, to look at soaps, shirts, and to check in at the bike shop to have a good understanding of what it would be like to rent a bike. I even found a lovely Hawaiian shirt with roosters, chickens, and chicks on it along with the usual Hawaiian patterns. We also found the juice shop that made and sold the Kombucha. We went back to the condo then and I did some of my PT exercises and wrote until it was dinner time. 

We walked back to the Big Save Market and right by it was an L&L, which actually exists all through the Front Range, now, but each L&L has their own menu, as they're individually owned and the owner gets to decide their menus. This one was really into the ramens along with the usual plates.

And I got the TanTan Ramen, which is a strange Japanese take on Chinese Dandan Mein, which is not soupy, but has chili spice to it. And the owner of this store asked me if I wanted my spicy spicy.

I decided that as with the chili pepper chicken, I might as well go big or go home, and I was so glad I did. It wasn't that hot, but the chilies were so potent I kept sneezing or coughing every time I drank the broth. It was so good. And you can see how generous they were with the roast pork. It also had a nice slab of naruto, a well marinated egg, and lots and lot of bamboo shoots that were super tender.

The amazing thing, for me, was that it was packaged for takeaway. The boiling hot soup was in the bowl and over it was this tray that held all the noodles, toppings, and everything. The owner said that I had to mix it all together to eat it, and given that we were eating there, I just dumped everything into the soup and dug in. 

I swear everything was cold before I dumped them into the soup; but by the time I ate it, everything was piping hot. So good.

John got a chance to eat a salad, and he took it cheerfully. It was a garlic shrimp salad that he really enjoyed. 

From there we just headed back home, no shave ice additions. The treats were good enough, and I was tired enough I wasn't going to be walking MORE after all of that. 

I mostly just wrote and got ready for bed after that. Tomorrow we were going down the South Coast, and that would be a whole 'nother adventure.