Kona and Coffee

 We are staying at a place near Hilo, on the East side of the Big Island, but our flight out is from Kona, on the West side.  So when we leave, we will need to drive from one side of the island to the other.  Our flight out is at 8AM, so being there 2 hours early, returning the rental car, gassing it up before we return it, and driving across the island means we will need to get up early.  How early depends on how long it takes to drive from our place to the airport.

So we decided to test drive it.  Times will vary, but roughly, we left here at 9AM and got to the airport at 11:30AM.  There were some issues — like going West on 11 instead of East, but we figured out that problem and turned around fairly quickly.  And there was probably more traffic at 9AM than there will be at 4AM, but it will be dark at 4AM.  So between 2 and 2.5 hours.

Then once we were in Kona, what to do?  At 11:30, lunch was the obvious choice.  During lunch we checked what else was available and found a tour of a coffee farm, Heavenly Hawaiian Farms.


They have acres of coffee trees up on the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean somewhat South of Kona.


The tour talked about the trees and also the coffee beans themselves.


The beans are picked by hand and then processed to clean them, select the best ones, separate the outside from the actual bean — the seed of the plant, and then to lay them out to dry.


As the beans dry, the water content in the beans drops.  When it gets to 11%, the beans are ready and can be packaged up and used.

On the drive back from Kona to Hilo, we stopped at the Moana Kea visitor center.  The visitor center is located 9200 feet above sea level, while the summit of Moana Kea is 13,796 feet.  But the summit is (a) closed due to high winds, and (b) only accessible by 4WD vehicles.  Plus just at the visitor center, I was getting altitude sickness from the thin air, just as I did in Bhutan.  So we looked around the visitor center,


and then came back down and continued to Hilo.

Getting from Kona to Hilo, or Hilo to Kona, means driving on the Saddle Road.  The Saddle Road runs between Moana Kea (where the observatories are) and Moana Loa (part of Hawaii Volcano National Park).  This road is a big deal to being able to get around on the Big Island, and it is named the Daniel K. Inouye Highway, after the Senator that presumably got the Federal Government to allocate funds to make it a good road.  But in addition to those two names, it is also Hawaii Route 200, and for some parts, Hawaii Route 2000.  It is mostly a 3 lane road — one lane for traffic in each direction and a passing lane for the long drive up.  The passing lane is given to the other side when you are coming down.  Strangely, neither end of the road really seems to reach somewhere; it just stops.  On the Kona end, it dead ends into Route 190, and in Hilo, it just stops at a traffic light on Komohana street.  The speed limit is 60 or 55 for most of the Saddle Road, although at times it drops to 45, for no obvious reason, before going back up. You do have to keep an eye out for wildlife on the road.  We saw goats on both sides of the road, and were told to watch out for the Hawaiian goose, the Nene, although we don’t think we ever saw any.

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