Our buddies were back this morning. I swear they’re used to being fed. They’re just too tame and come looking for something morning and evening. I caved and gave them a few pieces of bread this morning. The one guy takes it from my hand. Someone’s been feeding them. And then these beauties joined us this morning too. They’re called Red Crested Cardinals.


We had time for a walk to the resort this morning before our 9:30 chocolate farm tour at Garden Island Chocolate farm. St. Regis Hotel is at the end of the road of this resort area. You can see it in some of our sunset photos but we hadn’t seen the view from that perspective so took the time this morning to do that. Some pretty nice views …


Right before we left before the chocolate farm tour this gorgeous rainbow popped up. Wow …


The chocolate farm tour. Wow. One of the best things we’ve done. Bob really wasn’t excited about it. He just couldn’t imagine how it could take 3 hours to talk about and taste chocolate. Shock shock, he loved it too. Coa and Angie are passionate about chocolate. Coa started this farm and business 13 years ago. This is the only cacao farm on the island that also produces chocolate.  The tour started with tasting fresh fruits – pineapple, avocado, banana, sugar cane and chocolate. Scrumptious!


From there they took us on a tour of part of their farm. Cacao trees need to be protected by other trees, so they’re typically planted underneath bigger, stronger trees. That’s one reason they have so many other fruit trees on the farm. One of the first trees they introduced us to was an Acia Berry tree. I didn’t know you only use the skin of the Acia berry. Lots of  work there.


We saw lots of cacao trees in various stages of growth. They start them from seeds and baby them for about three years until they’re strong enough to plant in the ground. Have you ever heard of a Jackfruit? We hadn’t. These babies can get up to 80lbs! A popular tree on the island. We saw a baby pineapple and those red pods are cacao pods.


Further along in the tour we came across some star fruit trees. You can tell from the photos lots of them were ripe and ready for picking. Several of us picked one from the tree and ate it. I’ve had them before but never that kind of fresh. They picked an entire bowl and handed them out for us to take to enjoy later. Pretty cool, huh?


Then Coa picked an avocado and handed it to someone in the group who will be on the island a few more days since it wasn’t quite ripe yet. Can you imagine how wonderful that’s going to taste?


Then they showed us a Sour Sop fruit. It looks hard and spikey but it’s actually soft. Angie had previously cut one up and had it ready to purée into a juice we got to try. Was very refreshing. She showed us peppercorns and vanilla beans. How stinkin’ cool that vanilla beans actually come from orchids. I had no idea. It’s the only orchid in the world that produces anything edible. The flower requires a certain type of bee to pollinate it – this bee doesn’t live here so she hand pollinates each flower hoping it will produce a bean. It takes 6-9 months for the bean to grow and ripen and another 6-9 months for it to dry and be ready for consumption. Vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world, with saffron being the first. Very informative morning.


Time for the chocolate tasting. Oh what fun! We started off with breaking open cacao beans and eating the nibs. They had two different kinds of cacao beans to try and they were very different in taste. There are tons of different varieties of cacao trees, which does affect the flavor of the chocolate but they said what makes the biggest difference in success or failure of the taste is the fermenting process. It was a trial and error testing for them. Anytime you’re fermenting and dealing with yeast it’s not a sure thing but they have a process they are successful with more often than not. Next comes the roasting of the beans, then the grinding (sometimes the nibs are ground for days before liquid enough to become chocolate) before they start experimenting with combinations of different varieties of cacao beans and added fruits, nuts and favors. We must’ve tasted about 20 different chocolate bars over the course of the morning. From plain chocolate bars to chocolate with pistachios, sea salt, peanut butter and raisins, almonds & coconut, ginger, pecans, bacon, one with chili pepper, one with goat cheese and something else (I should’ve made notes), and it went on and on. We loved every minute of it (well, almost – we weren’t really prepared for the bugs and the mud). Even Bob was impressed and enjoyed it even though he wasn’t really looking forward to it. We walked out of the with several chocolate bars (regular, ginger and sea salt). We will be milking these babies. It’s the best stuff around.

Aaaaand, even though we’d just sampled fresh fruit, fruit juice, hot chocolate and 20 different kinds of chocolate in the last three hours it was lunch time so we headed to the Lighthouse Bistro for lunch. LOL We got a simple rice bowl that hit the spot and just enjoyed the breeze for the next hour or so. We decided to drive down to Hanalei and look around at the shops to see if anything jumped out at us. Bob got a hat and I picked up a couple of small things but not really anything I couldn’t live without.


It was nice to have time to come back to the condo and chill. Before we knew it sunset was closing in on us. The usually groups had started to form out by the fence, so we grabbed our cameras and planted outside to watch the show. It never fails – every days we’ve been here those huge dark rain clouds start rolling in about 4:00 and screw up what may have been have best sunset ever! But it is what it is so we just sit and wait to see how it’s gonna play out. I found a new setting on my camera and have been playing with it. It really makes a difference and I’m really loving it with a lot of my images.


Towards the end of the sunset show I turned around and looked toward the group congregating at the fence and noticed a drone! For real? Someone has a drone over there taking pictures of the sunset? Wow, there must be some big money in that group. How cool is that?


That’s pretty much the day. We came in and threw a spinach and strawberry salad together for a late dinner and just chilled out until bedtime (which is now). We have another early morning tomorrow (I know, you’re in shock). We can’t do the 11 mile Napoli Coast trail so we’re just going to walk about 1/2 mile in and take pictures that way. They said you can get great shots even going 1/2 mile. It red clay muddy and slippery – that’s the biggest issue. From there were planning to hang out a a beach for the rest of the morning. We’ll see how that goes.

Ta Ta for now!