Kealakekua Bay is quite picturesque even above the surface.
My boyfriend and I each have scuba experience. (You may recall my blogs about that from last summer.) We can both swim (him quite well, from his high school years on the swim team). But neither of us had been snorkeling before, and so we were a bit timid about the whole thing. There had been life jackets with the bed and breakfast gear, which we'd forgotten to grab. And both of us had a healthy respect for how hard it is to tread water for a long time under normal circumstances. So we just didn't want go very far out -- I'm guessing never more than 75 feet from the coast, if that.
Consequently, we didn't see much. There were a few colorful fish. But ringing in our minds were those forgotten life jackets, and the guy at the shore trying to talk us into renting his kayaks by telling us all the good snorkeling was on the north side of the bay. So rather than push farther in the hopes of seeing better stuff, we gave up the enterprise fairly early.
When we got back to shore though, we realized how very not tired we really were, how easy it had been to keep afloat with minimal effort using the fins and simply relaxing. So it turned out that this first snorkel attempt, though a bit dull, was a real confidence booster for us to try more later in the trip. (A story I'll get to in a future post.) We might have even tried again right then, but there was more on the day's itinerary. So back to the car it was, and on to the next stop.
That stop was Mountain Thunder, a coffee plantation. Even a non-coffee drinking philistine like me is aware of the reputation of Kona coffee. Lacking the bitter, acidic finish of most coffees, it's grown only by a few plantations in a small strip of land on western Hawaii. My boyfriend was eager to go straight to the source, and I was certainly interested enough in the coffee-making process to go along.
The plantation tour was both better and worse than I was expecting. What I think I was expecting was something like the Sterling Vineyard tour we'd done in Napa Valley, substituting coffee for wine. And I think Mountain Thunder actually had a special VIP tour that offered exactly that -- at an exorbitant price tag. So instead we did their free tour, which was a bit disappointing in how little of the plantation we actually got to see.
On the other hand, what we did get to see in the one-hour tour was quite interesting, and super informative as well. After seeing everything that goes into making coffee, I now understand why good coffee costs as much as it does. From picking the cherries from their trees...
...to extracting their seeds...
...to getting the roast just right...
...I learned that there's a lot that goes into making coffee, and a lot that could go wrong at each step. I also now understand exactly what the differences in roasts mean, and know that most "Kona coffee" is actually just a 10% blend, along with plenty of other little factoids that were quite interesting even without a love for coffee.
And here's the big shock. If you can get the pure, 100% Kona coffee? It's actually not bad. It still needed about twice as much sugar as I'll put in my tea, but the samples we got to try? I actually had seconds. (Gasp!) As advertised, no acidic aftertaste. Far less bitterness. We brought a limited (and pricey) stash of "the good shit" back with us. And though I'm not yet sure I want to cultivate a coffee habit, I could imagine doing so with this stuff. (And access to milk and sugar.)
Seriously, what is happening to me?
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