Monday has been my favorite day of vacation so far. Catie has a knack for finding experiences on vacation more bespoke than the average TripAdvisor. The experiences usually are on TripAdvisor after all, but aren’t surfaced as well as the search-optimized snorkel trips. In this case, the travel blog The Blonde Abroad helped us find the O’o Farms Coffee and Brunch tour.
About an hour from our resort in Ka’anapali, the four-ish acre farm was in the upcountry highlands, toward the center of Maui. Charlie, an ex-Seattle resident and telecom industry veteran showed us the various coffee plants on the farm, showed us which coffee cherries to pick, talked us through the crop rotations, and told us the mythic origin story of coffee — a devil’s drink inadvertently discovered around 850 C.E. and quickly tasted by the pope soon thereafter.
It might have been the 3+ cups of joe before 11am, but a lot of what I learned has evaporated a day later. Memorable points were that beans have to sit in a dry bag for some 120 days after picking before they’ve achieved the moisture levels ready to roast. While Hawai’i is proud of their locally grown coffee, the plant is not native to the islands. In fact, most of the plants we saw that day weren’t native, including the notoriously invasive Eucalyptus tree, which has also spread to San Francisco (usually by intentional planting before the consequences are understood).
After the farm tour we were served a tasty three course brunch. Unfortunately, the conversation with a mom and her 14 year old (non-coffee drinking, yet) adopted daughter who was raised on Hawai’i from 17 months old was so interesting that I forget to take a single picture of the meal. The first course was a sourdough cinnamon-roll-eqse creation, topped with powdered coffee cherry spice and allspice with fresh Hawaiian pineapple. The second course was a root-vegetable salad all of which was pulled from the ground within eyesight, and the third was a frittata with the best texture I’ve ever had. I forgot to ask if the eggs came from the farm, or were pickpocketed from feral chickens nearby, also invasive.
Catie insisted on taking the northern route back to the hotel — we had taken the southern route in the morning. Apple Maps was highly resistant to guiding us that way because as it turned out, the route is 80% single lane roads with a 20 mph speed limit. But they don’t yet build sightseeing into the navigation algorithms and that’s why one would take the nortern route, which we did.
We happened upon picturesque coastline, a motorcyclist and his wife enjoying Jäger and jack along the route, and some deadly coastal tidal pools that only tourists visit, because on average 1 person or so is killed per year by “rogue” waves.
A digression about the interesting Olivine pools. The pools are holes in any unprotected rocky area filled with water by waves that crash up against the rock. A quick glance at the area and it is clear to see how dangerous they are. It doesn’t take a rogue wave to crest over the rock and sweep any tourist bathing in the pool up, over, and into the dangerously turbulent waters 15 feet away. It only takes a wave about 8 feet tall to do this, which is far from atypical here.
Anyway, before knowing all this, because the excitement of natural beauty can temporarily oust common sense, I wanted to go down to the pools. Catie wisely held us back. Indeed, only tourists venture there, as is true of all tourist traps.