Day 6: Captain Cook: Wow, some all new material (compared to last year)!

January 16, 2016

We took some time this morning to read our blog from last year for this section of the ride. We were just trying to get an idea of how far we might get tomorrow when we strike off south. The blog turned out to be so interesting, we read quite a bit of it. But it made me a bit nervous to see the nice coverage I gave to so many topics. One year younger Steve is pretty tough competition!

Well hah hah Steve, because today we uncovered some stuff that you totally missed last year! Before going into it, though, I need a bit of a disclaimer. Despite the glitzy tourist brochure image of Hawaii, and despite the actually quite good local handout "101 Things To Do In Hawaii", most of the Island is not even small towns, but just old farmsteads and rusty or rundown commercial buildings or homes. True, a fellow from California yesterday was bemoaning the loss of the good old days, when he could just camp on any beach and subsist on fish, fruit, and coconuts. But despite the tourist fiction and the traffic this is still a very sleepy place.

So that helps to exlain why the first giant blockbuster thing that one year younger Steve totally missed is a .. supermarket. Of course this is not just any supermarket, it is the only one between Sack N Save in Kona and the one in Ocean View. We are talking about the Choice Mart, right here in Captain Cook. This is the place that we found out about yesterday, the modern incarnation of the Greenwell general store. We made it our first stop and this is what we found.

Although this was a real supermarket, with many aisles, checkouts, and departments the produce in the produce department looked "real". That is, for example, the oranges were not bright orange,and had speckles and stuff. A good sign. Next bananas. I had been peeved with the farmers' market lady in Kona town for trying to charge $1 for a single banana.But here we could see the "official" grocery store price - $1.69/LB. That strikes us as about double the Seattle price. With bananas dripping off plants all around us, what gives?

Our next big discovery was French baguettes, genuine "Choicemart's Own". Wow, that means Michel Fleurance from Nantes could come here and have a chance of survival. Of course, we did not have the courage to actually try the baguettes.

Baguettes were not the only foreign food on offer. We also found, for example, beef jerky. That's normal enough, but this came from the Tillamook Country Smoker, a place in Oregon that we passed while cycling there. Lots of other stuff was more local and appropriate though. For example, there was pancake syrup - not maple, but coconut, coconut/pineapple, or guava. Then getting right down to it, there was the dried, salted, chili, Cuttlefish - admittedly a product of Taiwan.

Quite aside from being fascinated by the type of products on offer, we were mad at ourselves for having carried such a bunch of food stuff up here from the Walmart in Kona town. Even worse, with the great Thai restaurant just next door here, we no longer feel like eating even locally sourced supermarket stuff.

Choicemart, a major tourist attraction, for us anyway.

Costly bananas. It would have been interesting to check those labels and see where they came from.

Baguettes! We could be back in Nantes (sort of).

Dodie finds some great Hawaii oriented activity books for kids.

Hawaiians favour many Asian style delicacies

One thing we will always eat, though, is fresh local fruit. So on leaving the Choicemart we immediately bumped in to a large fruit stand. We had missed this yesterday, because it was hiding directly across the street from Choicemart! But now here was the real thing, in terms of piles of fresh, real looking, exotic fruits. An added bonus was the man behind the "counter", an excellent salesman who was full of information about the source, freshness/ripeness, and uses of each item. We got samples and descriptions from him of ginger and (something) juice, lilikoi juice, various varieties and ripenesses of avocados, coconuts, etc. etc.

In the end, we had him hack open a coconut and pour the "water" into one of our water bottles, while scraping out the rather slimy coating of the water chamber into a baggie. The man deemed this bit "Hawaiian royal jelly". It is a good thing we know where the Place of Refuge is, though, because this was a kapu food for commoners (in ancient times) and we would have been sentenced to death for eating it. We also walked off with mango fruit leather and a bag of salted macadamias.

All this fun happened within a half km of the hotel, so you can see we were not getting very far. But now we struck off back south a bit to where Royal Kona coffee would be offering, we knew, unlimited Kona coffee tasting plus banana bread at $4 a loaf. So we sat at their deck overlooking the sea far below, and enjoyed the coffee - which I still say is just so so, and a moist and flavourful banana bread. Someone sitting nearby commented on our very faded yellow reflective clothing, and we commented on his gorgeous and functional motorcycling pants. They came from Germany, he said, brought back by his German wife. There then ensued a session of him and us reminiscing about good or beautiful things we had seen in Bavaria. After a while, we both moved on to Venice and northern Italy. I suggested this was bizarre given that we were sitting in front of a view of pure paradise. He said that after 11 years living here it was all old hat. I guess the palms are always shadier (or whatever) where you are not.

Royal Kona shows a good short film about Kona coffee, and I had a crack at making a pirate "cam" version of this, like they do with Hollywood films. I am not sure my camera and I were doing a good job of it at all, but anyway my battery ran out in the middle. Still, if it is at all watchable, I will post a link to a Youtube of what I got (could be a while in the future). It dawned on me that the film probably was on Youtube already, but I have not spotted it. On the other hand there are lots of films made by people visiting this area, so now I feel I am not only competing with my own past self but with a whole horde of people who have already seen and done everything.

The view from the balcony at Royal Kona Coffee

Dodie sits at Royal Kona, with many coffee tasters. She found that though she does not drink coffee, she could tolerate the chocolate macadamia flavoured one.

That seems to apply to our next thing, which was to cycle back north, past our hotel, and on to the last Greenwell thing that we had not earlier picked up - the tour of the present day Greenwell coffee operation. And yes, somebody has already posted a Youtube of their experience there. Grrr. Anyway, we did learn some things that at least previous Steve did not know.

We learned that in order to limit the height of the coffee trees and to reinvigorate them, every few years they are basically chopped right off about two to three feet above the ground. New shoots then come from the stumps, though it takes one year of no production for them to get back into gear. With this type of program of renewal, coffee trees can survive 100 years or more. In fact we were shown some trees that had been planted by the founders 150 years ago, and we tasted some coffee from 100 year old trees. This coffee sells for well over $50 per pound.

Our guide at Greenwell Coffee shows one of the last bags of cherry to come in. The harvest is now basically over. Any cherry coming in now is from very high altitude farms.

Here you can see the brutal pruning technique. The trees just beside are an experiment with only partial pruning.

A coffee flower. This is the season when the tree will begin to blossom.

A nice expanse of drying coffee. Once dry like this they are in the "parchment" phase (the cherry fruit and mucilage has earlier been removed). Next the parchment will be removed and the beans polished, resulting in "green" coffee ready for roasting.

There are also many fruit trees on the Greenwell farm, and oranges and avocados were in abundant supply. These were pretty much free for the taking, so we came home with even more oranges. Out dresser here is looking much like a fruit stand.

From Greenwell Coffee we made one last stab into the north, just far enough to reach an outlet for Tropical Dreams ice cream. The guidebook says this is the best. We have not done te research on this, have not even checked out Dave's Ice Cream across the street, but in absolute terms, Tropical Dreams was excellent.

Bolstered by ice cream and lubricated by coconut water we made our wayback to Captain Cook. Except for bucking the traffic this was about the easiest day there could be. Still Dodie reported that she was exhausted. We think that for Northerners, even easy cycling and farm touring in the bright sun can be very tiring. We had a similar report from a lady from Britich Columbia that we spoke to yesterday. Despite having had lots of water she just about collapsed at South Point.

Dodie is napping now, and will recover her strength. Maybe a little Thai food will help with that. It will be good, because where we are heading is going to get a lot hotter and dryer, and the Thai food infinitely scarcer. Follow us tomorrow, into the K'au desert.

Special note: from our last year's experience, we are also heading into an area of no internet signal. It could be one extra day before we post again.

Postscript - In the News

Today's news says that a few more cases of Dengue Fever are still popping up, and that the closure of Waipio Valley (and no doubt the beach parks at Hookena and Milolii) will be a fairly long term thing.

An election campaign is starting for mayor of the county of Hawaii - which is the whole island. The incumbent, Mayor Billy was in our opinion rather lame, and we heard he was caught using a county credit card in a Waikiki strip joint. Last year we tried to contact him to complain about camping policies, but he was "too busy" to talk to us.

Mayor Billy was a bad case, but are these any better?

The annual Kona Coffee Festival has concluded. Our choice for Miss Kona Coffee did not win. Clearly the judges have no idea what they are doing!

Contestants in the Miss Kona Coffee contest. Dodie and I instantly identified and agreed on the most beautiful one (but not the winner). Notice the various ethnicities denoted by the names. However, the faces do not always match the ethnicity of the name - strange.

Today's ride: 18 km (11 miles)
Total: 129 km (80 miles)

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