Birthday on a Boat, and Chocolate

It’s my birthdayyyy. Anyway, we woke up with no real set plan until 2:15 when we needed to board our sunset catamaran tour. Adela still doesn’t believe me that a catamaran is a thing. For our morning activity we decided on driving over to Shipwreck Beach and then walking over to the start of the Maha’ulepu Heritage Trail. The trail starts at the end of the super-picturesque beach and continues on for an unspecified amount of time. The beach is primarily for surfing, but we mentally logged a good spot to hang out. The trail meanders through the Makewehi Cliffs which are “lithified sand dunes” – basically sandstone that’s been eroded into looking super awesome. We strolled around for about a total of an hour before making our way back to the hotel. The wind was… very active which made it actually a nice hike. Otherwise our archnemesis the sun would have turned us into Paul and Adela crisps.

We got back to the hotel and snagged our snorkel gear to head to Lawai Beach for some snorkeling. The actual beach real-estate of Lawai beach would be about as large as a medium sized living room. But the snorkeling put Poipu beach to total shame. Way more fish just right there. Still no great amount of living coral. Also… lots of rocks to skin your knees on. Not like anyone would ever be so uncoordinated as to do that. Our snorkeling was cut short by some mild total mask failure so we cleaned up and went to get some poke and dole whips. This time we stopped at Koloa Fish Market – super busy but super good. Adela had never had a Dole whip before so we got some to go with the poke. It was a unique flavor combination.

Next came the highlight of the day – a cruise around the Napali Coast on a catamaran that ended slightly after sunset. We cruised with Captain Andy’s, which I had randomly found from my aggressive google search of “catamaran tours kauai” and had heard of them from several youtubes. They’ve got a pretty polished setup going on. Anyway, the cruise was on their slightly bigger 65′ catamaran and was set to last a little longer than four hours. The first thing we noticed was just how blue the water is! Like… bluer than blue. It’s crazy. The coastline of Kauai is also pretty varied – the start of the tour was on the southern coast, where it’s much more plain like. The western coast (the Napali coast) is much more dramatic. Mountain ridges seem to plunge right into the ocean, with lush valleys between them. While sailing we got a little bit of a history lesson as to how the Polynesians lived here. It was a little hard to grasp the scale of everything, since most of the cliffs are about 3000 feet high.

We ended up sailing right past where I had hiked to on Sunday, which was pretty cool. The surf was pretty choppy when we went out and a couple people unfortunately got seasick, which was not cool 🙁 We decided we needed to bring zofran to hand out to people if we do another cruise like this. Once we got turned around and headed back they opened up the bar and started serving dinner. We decided to eat inside the cabin so that our food did not become projectiles from the strong winds gusting at us. The signature drink on the boat was a sneaky tiki – basically fruit juice with a little alcohol mixed in covered with a little bit of dark rum. You were allowed to order them until you could no longer say sneaky tiki.

They stopped the boat for a few minutes as the sun went down next to the island. It was absolutely amazing! Probably the highlight of our trip so far. Being on a boat definitely makes everything better. Mostly when it’s not your boat.

The next morning we got to sleep in a little bit again and had a relatively lax day planned. I had found a tour of a local chocolate farm, Lydgate Farms! We had no idea what to expect going in but it turned out to be quite the little gem. The tour is now usually given by one of the employees but we had the pleasure of having Will, the owner, give us our tour. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone know as much about anything as thing man knows about chocolate. But not just his chocolate… all chocolate. The tour started off looking at some of the cacao trees and how the cacao pod grows and how they graft the good trees onto the eh trees. Next we talked about vanilla before progressing to eating some local grown fruit. And man is fresh fruit delicious. Tropical fruit is just so damn good.

We walked a little ways more and came upon another little group of trees they have growing. Here Will opened up a cacao pod and we got to eat some pulp (delicious) and cacao seed (not delicious). How something so tasty can come from something so… not tasty… is pretty incredible. After teasing us with raw seeds Will eventually fed us some chocolate. We ate all of the chocolate they had for sale, and then we tried some various chocolates from around the world. The whole time he was poking fun at Hershey’s. Not really poking fun at, just explaining why his chocolate is better than theirs. And it definitely was way way better. He also did an amazing job steering the conversation and tour back on track around the one really obnoxious woman. This seems to be a common theme in our vacation so far…

We bought some of their stuff and then headed out to get some poke at The Fish Express. The people here were nicer to order from than Koloa Fish Market, and the poke was very tasty. No dole whips today though. The post-poke lethargy hit us pretty hard so we gave in and lied down for an hour. After waking up we decided we really just wanted to sit at the beach so we drove down to Shipwreck Beach and set up our chairs in the shade on the far end of the beach. We brought some hard teas with us (which were delicious) and read for a couple hours while listening to the waves.