another eye opens

After toodling around the north shore, hiking up at the top of Waimea Canyon, and doing the helicopter tour, we were content to spend the rest of the week holed up at our VRBO (vacation rental by owner) in Poipu on the sunny, dry south shore of Kauai. Our cozy one-bedroom apartment opened right out to this spectacular view at sunrise of a gorgeous bay, just a few steps away from our lanai/breakfast table.

The view and the proximity to the water make it sound like a sweet secluded cottage, maybe…but no. More like:

A condo building full of well-off white people from North America. At least we were on the first floor, second from the end. Elsewhere on the island you could see — and hear — roosters everywhere. Not so much here, though we were visited every afternoon by these friendly critters.

The bay offered spectacular snorkeling. Tons of beautiful, colorful fish — Moorish idols, pufferfish, triggerfish, needlefish — and gigantic sea turtles the size of a coffee table.

All we really wanted to do was lie around and read books.

I finished:
The Secret Chief Revealed — Myron Stolaroff
Black Deutschland — Darryl Pinckney
Nietzsche for Beginners (ridiculous and incoherent)
The Marrying Kind — Ken O’Neill
The Spell — Alan Hollinghurst
The Child — Sarah Schulman
Swords in the Hands of Children — Jonathan Lerner

Of course you have to eat, so we checked out the local farmer’s market and stocked up on some fruits new and unusual to us: rambutan (the red spiky-looking balls), chico (the purple ones — they sort of look like kiwi and taste a bit like cinnamon), and dragon’s eyes or langan (inside the thin shell, a slimy pitted fruit that tastes like a cross between a grape and a pear). Plus fresh pineapple and those small, dense, tasty apple bananas.

Right next door to our apartment complex stood the Beach House Restaurant, where people gravitated from miles around to view the sunset.

It’s not unusual to get a brief sprinkle sometime during the day in Hawaii, but you don’t always get a rainbow, let alone a double rainbow.

Our favorite place on Kauai turned out to be the historic old town of Hanapepe, which among other things is where the animated Disney film Lilo and Stitch took place, something we learned from a sign painted on the side of a delightfully funky derelict old stucco movie palace called the Aloha Theater.

We had lunch at Bobbie’s, which serves very local cuisine — which in Hawaii means really fatty pork and spicy Korean deep-fried chicken over white rice with sugar-loaded soda pop in island-fruity flavors (guava, pineapple, lilikoi/passionfruit). Kinda gross, to tell you the truth.

We couldn’t resist stopping in at Talk Story Bookstore, which bills itself as the Westernmost bookstore in the United States. The friendly couple who run the store shelve fiction in separate sections for male authors and female authors, and they told us they’re such book-nerds that when they traveled to Iceland and discovered a cache of ’50s pulpy paperbacks they left clothes behind to make room in their luggage for the books.

Clearly the town tries hard to stay in the game with a string of art galleries, but the number of boarded up or abandoned buildings gives it the feel of a ghost town, which I found perfectly charming. I also learned that there is such a thing as a movement for Hawaiian independence.

From Dave Seminara’s “36 Hours in Kauai” feature in the New York Times’ Travel section last November, we’d caught wind of “Jacqueline on Kauai,” aka The Aloha Shirt Lady, who will whip up a custom-made Hawaiian shirt for you overnight. Jacqueline Vienna is a character, a tough-cookie hippie grandma with great taste. We met her Wednesday afternoon and went back Friday morning to pick up our shirts, which we’re thrilled with.

They call Kauai “the Garden Isle” for its natural beauty, which shows up in the lush greenery along the north shore, the striking cliffs along the Na Pali Coast (along which there is no roadway), and the colorful ridges that make up Waimea Canyon, Hawaii’s miniature version of the Grand Canyon.

We dutifully drove to the top of Koke’e State Park to have a look at both the coastal views and the canyon.

We encountered a local family scattering Grandma’s ashes in the form of five big balloons they tossed over the side of the cliff, which struck me as ecologically insensitive for Hawaiian natives, but whatever.

And inevitably we booked a one-hour helicopter tour, which is the only way you’re going to get a glimpse of the Na Pali Coast in all its splendor.

Our honey-voiced pilot, Marty, also flew us into the otherwise inaccessible crater of the long-dormant volcano.

After a brief overnight stopover in unseasonably balmy San Francisco, Andy and I arrived in Kauai for our belated honeymoon. We spent the first two nights at a lovely Airbnb in Kapaa hosted by a couple of yoga teachers and healing practitioners (one of whom lived in the same Upper West Side apartment as me in 1993).

That gave us a perch from which to explore the north shore. We sought out Secret Beach, the secluded stretch of sand and rocks favored by clothing optional beach fans, which was so secret and secluded that we had it all to ourselves.

We stopped for a macaroon and tea at the Kilauea Bakery and then drove all the way to the end of the road, past the lush fields and gorgeous beaches made famous in the movies (South Pacific, Jurassic Park, King Kong). Then we doubled back to the schmancy St. Regis Hotel in Princeville for the obligatory sunset photos over cocktails on the balcony.

(click photos to enlarge)

The weekend began with a lovely road trip through New England. We stopped for lunch at an unlikely Polish deli outside Springfield, MA: kielbasa, pierogis, sauerkraut.

Our destination: Song Soul Farm on many acres outside Chester, VT, home to Kate and Jeff, college friends of Andy’s, who raise apple and pear trees, chickens, guinea fowl, three cats, and a herd of nine llamas. Llamas are dazzling creatures to be around. The guest cottage we stayed in sits right in the middle of their pasture, so all day long they promenaded back and forth, sometimes grazing on the lawn right outside the house where I sat reading.

Walking in the woods on a crisp autumn day meant encountering beautiful colors and an ancient weathered cabin.

Kate and Jeff are a delightful, smart, eccentric couple with a beautiful rambling farmhouse and a passion for pressing apples into cider, mowing fields, marshalling tractors for apple harvesting, and teaching city slickers how to feed llamas by hand.