A Hidden Gem

We started the day with a trip to Buns in the Sun Bakery to locate it 1)since it's our pickup point for our Mauna Kea Observatory/Stargazing Tour on Thursday and 2)well.....it's a bakery.  And you hate to just 'locate' a bakery without contributing to the local economy, right?  So we dutifully relieved them of one apple Danish to split and two cups of joe, even though we were on our way to a coffee plantation tour.

We are so thankful that we brought the Garmin because it has been so easy to find so many places using it and that was never truer than with the Mountain Thunder Coffee Plantation.  We can't imagine how we could have found it without that help.  This plantation was featured on an episode of Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs.   Check it out....

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/dirty-jobs/videos/kona-coffee.htm

We learned about coffee cultivation, growing, and harvesting and learned that the many animals milling about were the 'ceos in charge of fertilizer'........who knew?

 

The coffee beans, at first, have a tan appearance, and are oval in shape.

 

When they are ready to be harvested, they're red and are called 'cherries' (top right), the red skins come off and can be used as mulch or brewed as a tea which is high in antioxidants leaving a bean which then needs to lose its outer covering(bottom right).  Those pictured on the left are the beans that would come out of the sorter ready to be roasted.  The ones on top are good, the ones on the bottom are defective in some way and are either discarded or sold to a roaster/brewer who sells a less expensive coffee.

 

We watched a portion of the Dirty Jobs video at this kiosk while we enjoyed samples of coffee and several kinds of tea.

                                                    The sorter...............

        The roasters.......temperatures (in the low 400's makes all the difference between roasts like Vienna and French.

Definitely educated about one of our favorite beverages and highly invigorated (we even smelled like coffee) we retraced our steps back down to Queen Kaahumanu Hwy and went to Kaloko-Honololau Nat'l. Park.  We had stopped by the visitor's center here (to get our passport stamped, remember?) on our first day here, but didn't have on good hiking shoes, so we purposed to return and oh glad we were that we did.

 

This is a perfect bay with some quiet spots, some good stretches of sand, great tide pools to examine...

some good lava rocks to climb around on......

and some, where while waiting for a photo op, you can just about 'become one with the wave', if you know what I mean (He took four pics before this one and kept saying, "Wait, I want to get it when the water is RIGHT behind you.")

We were rewarded for our quiet patience again!  Saw five of these guys coming in close to eat limu (seaweed looking stuff attached to the lava rock).

And the walk back inland was picturesque, as well, don't you think?  We'll revisit this 'hidden gem' of a beach habitat tomorrow with a picnic lunch and our chairs, a book to read aloud to one another and some good drinks.  We talked to a man who'd been snorkeling and he said, while snorkeling he'd heard a sound like a freight train.  It turned out to be a school of fish that swam toward and then all around him.

When we got back to the condo we went to our favorite spot to watch the sunset (out at the end of the building from where this pic was taken) and were rewarded with quite a breeching display by several whales about 200 yards offshore.