October 2011

The ancient Menehune fishpond off the Huleia River. Photo by David Lansing.

So yesterday I got up relatively early and drove to the Nawiliwili Small Boat Harbor in Lihue to go kayaking up the Huleia River. Alicia had given me very explicit directions on how to get there but I still got lost. How can anyone get lost on such a small island? It’s a mystery.

Anyway, I finally found the harbor and even came across several little kayak concessions along the road but not the one I was looking for. So after driving around and around the harbor, and then back up the road towards Niumalu, I finally stopped at a spot along the river where I saw a tiny little Hawaiian woman, wearing board shorts and a bikini top, who was pulling some kayaks out of the water. I told her I was lost and looking for Hidden Valley Falls Kayak Adventure.

“You’re not lost,” she said, smiling. “You’re found.” Then she climbed up the bank of the river to shake my hand and introduce herself. “I’m Heaven,” she said. “I’m going to take you upriver.”

Well damnation! What do you think about that? I was being led upriver by Heaven! As it turns out, that wasn’t her real name, of course. That would be Heavenly Mist. “But my friends call me Heaven.”

I knew right away I was in good hands. Heaven got me outfitted and sprayed some bug juice on my arms and legs (“There will be mosquitos”) and then I climbed in to the front of our faded red tandem kayak and she pushed us off from shore, hopping into the back.

Now anytime you’re lucky enough to get Heaven sitting in the back of a kayak with you, there are bound to be some questions and I had plenty. I asked Heaven where we were headed and she said, “It all depends.”

Okay. I get it. I needed to be on my best behavior. Heaven, who was much smaller than I would have imagined, told me that she was so small, some people said she was a Menehune. If you’re not familiar with Menehune, they’re sometimes described as Hawaiian leprechauns. They’re tiny and mischievous and are said to have unusual powers. For instance, they say that the Menehune can build walls and villages overnight, but they only do it under a full moon and when no one can see them.

I asked Heaven if they did indeed build things like the stone walls of Hawaiian fishponds overnight and she said, “Do you doubt it?” Then she paddled us through a grove of mangroves stretching along the banks of the river, winding her way through a mysterious channel, and then stuck the paddle in the water to stop us. Before me was an ancient stonewall, hundreds of feet long.

The Menehune built this one night several hundred years ago, Heaven told me. Only they were disturbed in the middle of the night as they were building it by a Tahitian prince and princess who stood on a bluff overlooking the river, watching them. “So they were turned in to stone. And they stand there today,” she said, pointing at a rock outcropping that looked mysteriously like a man and a woman standing on an overlook. “So what do you think?” she said. “Do you believe the story?”

Absolutely, I told her. Who would be crazy enough to think otherwise? And with that, Heaven continued to take me up the river.

The original POG.

I don’t normally eat breakfast when I’m home. A latte and a banana or something similar usually suffices. But when I travel I like to go to the local roadside café just to see what the down-home cooking is like. Since the islands are so multi-cultural, it’s not surprising that the traditional Hawaiian breakfast, loco moco, includes rice covered with a hamburger and gravy, crowned with a fried egg.  It’s fun to try once but it’s not my favorite breakfast.

I much prefer some brown rice with Portuguese sausage (linguica, which is what my little Portuguese grandmother always served me for breakfast when I visited her house), and some fresh fruit like pineapple and papaya. Oh, and POG.

POG (passion fruit, orange, guava) is, to me, what Hawaii tastes like. I think I had it the first time I visited Maui, back in the early 80s, and have been addicted to it ever since.

POG was created by a woman named Mary Soon who worked as a food consultant for the Haleakala Dairy on Maui (since closed down) but it was made famous by Meadow Gold Dairy which still produces the stuff (they make 1.3 million gallons of the juice every month). If you’ve ever been on an inner-island flight in Hawaii, your attendant probably offered you a choice of water, soda, or POG on your flight.

It’s kind of hard to find on the mainland although I’m fortunate to live near a Hawaiian-Japanese market that carries the real stuff. A few other companies have tried to formulate their own POG versions but Hawaiians will tell you that nothing tastes quite like the Meadow Gold Dairy original version.

That said, you can try and make your own POG by blending one cup Kern’s guava nectar, one cup Welch’s passion fruit nectar, and 2/3 cup no-pulp orange juice. This version will probably be a little less sweet than real POG, which is fine with me and perfect for POG cocktails—just add a shot of rum and a squeeze of lime and hula away!

Glass Beach, Kauai. Photo by David Lansing.

In my little green bungalow at the Waimea Plantation Cottages is a copy of Kauai Traveler magazine that I quite like. It has gorgeous photos of just about every waterfall on the island and a nice article on “Canoe Plants,” the 27 crucial plants, like breadfruit and taro, brought over in long voyaging canoes by Polynesians from the Marquesas Islands sometime around 200 A.D.

There’s also the requisite “best beaches” piece that gives you insider information on all of the island’s beaches from Kauapea, “the secret beach,” to Lumahai, “one of the most stunning and photographed beaches in Kauai, made famous as the location for the movie South Pacific….”

There’s Barking Sands Beach and Baby Beach and Tunnels (one of the best snorkeling beaches on the island), but nowhere will you read about Glass Beach, which truly is Kauai’s most secret beach.

I first heard about Glass Beach from a Hanapepe local almost twenty years ago. My daughter and I were slowly combing the sand at Salt Ponds Beach looking for the odd piece of coral or seaglass when an old auntie sitting in a beach chair beneath the shade of a coconut tree said, apropos of nothing, “Da kine glass by da gas tanks.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. But a young girl—maybe her niece or granddaughter?—explained to us that she was talking about Glass Beach. “There’s a million pieces of seaglass there,” she said. I asked her where it was but her directions weren’t great. Take the road to Port Allen, turn when it runs out and follow the dirt road down towards the big white gas tanks near the beach. “You find it no problem,” she said.

We followed her directions, ending up in a very ugly industrial area near Hanapepe, parking our rental car next to what looked like an oil refinery surrounded by a cyclone fence, and, hoping our car would still be there when we got back, walked a few minutes down the dirt road towards the water. There was this very ugly little crescent beach within the shadows of the giant gas tanks and a stretch of black sand littered with, as auntie had said, what must have been thousands if not millions of pieces of glimmering sea glass: white, brown, amber, green, dark blue, pale aqua. It was amazing. My daughter and I filled our pockets with the stuff and took it home. Today it sits in a glass jar in a bathroom and every time I see it, it reminds me of that day with my daughter.

A couple of years ago I was staying near Poipu and one day I went off in search of Glass Beach. I found it after a bit of wandering around but when I got there, there was lots of plastic and paper litter but only a few pieces of glass on the beach. In talking with someone back at my hotel who grew up in the area, I was told that that’s always the way it’s been at Glass Beach. Some times there is lots and lots of glass and some times there is nothing; it all depends on the tides and the winds and the wave action.

Yesterday morning, after breakfast, I drove back down to Port Allen, past the old warehouses, and parked along the cyclone fence protecting the big white gas tanks, which are still here, and walked down to the beach. Beautiful, sparkling jelly bean-shaped shards of blue and brown and white glass were everywhere. Not as abundant as it was that first time I’d visited with my daughter but still quite a treat. I took just a handful. Just enough to fill a plastic sandwich bag which I will send back to my daughter in San Francisco—without telling her where it came from—once I get home. I have a feeling she’ll know immediately where it came from.

A Waimea Coconut Cloud. Photo by David Lansing.

The thing about staying in one of the Waimea Plantation cottages is that you tend to not want to go anywhere. You spend the late afternoon hanging out at the pool, a simple old-fashioned rectangular affair with no water slides, no infinity edges, watching the pink-skinned children playing Marco Polo while their moms and dads snooze or read their books, and then about five you reluctantly wander back up the great lawn that stretches for 200 yards from the beach to the resort’s restaurant, The Grove, dragging your beach towel behind you, grasping a wet magazine or two in your water-shriveled hand, back to your cottage where you take a long shower and spread coconut-scented lotion over your slightly-sunburnt limbs and wonder whether you’ll have a cool glass of Chardonnay or a g+t out on the veranda as the sun sets.

And then, although you contemplate driving into town and having dinner at the Hawaiian barbecue place or maybe the shrimp place, you end up getting lazy and decide to just follow the tiki torches that line both sides of the great lawn back up to the old plantation house that used to be the main residence of the Faye family back in the early 1900s, and ask for a table on the lanai of the restaurant.

They’ll bring you a menu printed just for the evening and you take your time contemplating the virtues of a paniolo-style grilled ribeye versus the furikake seared ahi with wasabi butter sauce but there is no hurry to make a decision. The tiki torch flames dance in the ocean breeze and the conversation around you tinkles like glass wind chimes and the air is sultry and warm. So you order an appetizer of hamahi sashimi and the resort’s signature cocktail, a Coconut Cloud, made with coconut milk and pineapple and rum, and you just take a sip and smile at the couple sitting across from you on the veranda who are celebrating their wedding anniversary, and you promise yourself that tomorrow night you’ll have dinner in town. Really. For sure.

Sipping a cocktail on my veranda. Photo by David Lansing.

As I write this I’m sitting on the veranda of my cottage, sipping a g+t and catching the late afternoon breeze off the ocean. A tree frog slowly hops across the lawn, stopping every few minutes to check for bugs or insects in the immediate vicinity. A dozen or more chickens are pecking at the dirt and the grass, watched over by a rooster who sits like a pasha in the garden next door, flanked by a couple of red and orange ti plants.

I take a sip of my drink and listen to the birds making their little clucking noises, feel the breeze on my face. Very relaxing. Every once in awhile the rooster will make his rooster noise, which, I’ve come to realize, is not really a cockle-doodle-do sound at all. More like an er-er-ER-er.

There’s no air-conditioning in my cottage, of course, which is just fine. Who the hell needs air-conditioning when you are living in a cottage just feet away from the beach? Last night I lay atop the sheets on my bed in the darkness just listening to all the noises in the air: the breeze teasing the palm fronds, the distant sound of waves breaking against the beach, and the irregular chirp of a gecko crawling around on the ceiling above me. It was the gecko’s chirp along with the soft whirr of the overhead ceiling fan that eventually lulled me to sleep.

It’s amazing how peaceful the distant sound of waves and the whirr of a slowly-revolving ceiling fan can be compared to sleeping under the strange, foreign chill of a hotel air-conditioner.