Last Day on Kauai

Spent our last day on Kauai on the beach, or, at least we tried hard to. Either the sun was burning down hard or clouds and winds made it uncomfortably cool. Worst were the short but hard sudden rain showers, which came like a massive wall, out of nowhere. After having ran to the car twice with all our beach equipment, and, nevertheless, having been soaking wet, we called our beach day a day and drove into Hanalei for a lunch of BBQ chicken.


Swimming wasn't an option anyway (not because of water temperature, but because of high waves and currents), and therefore we walked the beach all the way to Hanalei Pier (pics above) and the estuary of the Hanalei River. Noticed that the river is much deeper and cooler than the ocean and noticed the still visible damages from the last hurricane in April 2018. Thanks to the mix of dark clouds and bright sun we watched a beautiful almost horizontal rainbow:



Later, we watched the surfers. As fascinating it is, it wouldn't be our sports - too much patience needed to find the right wave to ride on, and a lot of courage needed, too.

On the way to the beach we passed by large taro fields and later, of course, had to check out what taro exactly is. Well, taro (Colocasia esculenta) belongs to the Araceae family (Aronstabgewächse). It's also called " Wasserbrotwurzel" in German. The fruit look similar to white-fleshed turnips/rutabagas (Steckrüben)and are eaten like potatoes. On Hawaii it's consumed as "poi", a saturating fermented taro paste. The leaves can be eaten like spinach or swiss chard.

On the way to the beach we met a couple from Washington State - the first real chat we had for days. Seems like most of the (mostly American) repeat/long-time vacationers here are rather grumpy and not too talkative, and the locals - only about 10 % are Native Hawaiians, the rest (about 1/3 each) is either Asian or "White", about 10 % Hispanic/Latino - have to struggle to make a living. Cost of living is tremendously high and wages seem to be pretty low.

In the afternoon we started to collect our stuff in the apartment, did another load of laundry, cut Peter's hair, and worked at the computer under the protective roof of the balcony. As great as the location of the apartment was, fact is that it was a little "remote". The town of Princeville itself mostly consists of a shopping mall with a couple of restaurants, Hanalei, well,,, and there is not a whole lot of things around. Driving south, where the larger cities are, is time- and nerve-consuming, and, the weather was challenging, too. But, tropical vegatation, views and the ocean compensated to some degree. We'll see how we feel tomorrow, at Waikiki.