For our last full day in Hawaii, we decided that we wouldn’t have a complete trip without a visit to an actual beach with honest-to-God sand where we could get in the water and swim. So we headed out to nearby Hapuna State Park, a lovely white sand beach
with just one teeny tiny problem:
At the beach, it turned out that the water wasn’t actually very swimmable, because of enormous waves. We understand now why so many people are into surfing in Hawaii — it’s a pretty obvious thing to do at many of the beaches! There were plenty of folks in the water with boogie boards, but since we didn’t know how to use them, we contented ourselves with other activities, and Alex found a way to amuse himself:
(Fortunately, despite his digging, he did not turn up any unexploded ordnance.) Afterwards, we went back to the hotel to continue lazing about on the beach with fruity beverages, but once more the weather wasn’t playing along. A flash flood warning was in effect and high winds were whipping in from the shore, kicking sand in our faces, threatening the palm trees in the open air lobby, and, worst of all, causing the outdoor bar to close early.
In the face of adversity, however, we had a brilliant idea. Earlier in the trip we had heard radio advertisements for the Big Island Chocolate Festival.* As it turned out, the festival was tonight, only a few short miles from our hotel! We purchased tickets, and after a brief shopping trip at the resort mall to buy a few more aloha shirts, we were on our way.
* One of the best parts of the trip has been listening to quaint radio commercials for small local events and businesses. Another excellent commercial is for a small bar that uses their hatred of Donald Trump as a strong selling point.
The Chocolate Festival, had, as promised, many many different chocolate dishes to try. My favorites were the Valrhona sea salt caramel chocolate and a dish by a local restaurant that was a sort of a chocolate tapioca pudding. The most interesting station was one where a cocoa pod was opened up and on display. It turns out that cocoa is really just a fruit with seeds, kind of like a melon, even though the seeds take up a very large percentage of the interior. The inner flesh that isn’t seeds, called mucilage, is - despite its namesake - quite fruity and tasty, a bit similar to passion fruit. In modern chocolate production, the mucilage is used as a sugar source for the fermentation of the beans that is a critical step in the process of chocolate production:
Anyway, the event was a bit heavy on the deserts as opposed to the savory dishes, especially for a vegetarian. Fortunately there was a salad bar:
But despite the world’s saddest salad bar, we were able to both get quite full and enjoy the greatest performing arts talents that the Kona public school system had to offer:
We also greatly enjoyed the silent auction, which was a who's-who of local businesses:
Alex insisted on going through the entire display, but we chose not to make any bids.
On the way back from the Chocolate Festival, we had a minor adventure finding a gas station as the range calculator on the car indicated we had only 20 miles to go before running on empty. Given that everything on the Big Island is miles apart, one wrong move could spell doom - especially given that we’d twice put tried to go to phantom gas stations on Google Maps.
Fortunately, this minor potential emergency was staved off when we … found a gas station.
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