Sugar cane and 4x4's

Today we went out with Aloha Kauai Tours on their Kauai Backroads 4x4 Tour. We met the group at the Kilohana Plantation where we parked my truck and jumped in their customized 4x4 van. We became acquainted with the other members of the tour as our soft spoken driver eased the van back onto the highway. Our driver explained that he was born and raised on Kauai and that he was over seventy years old. He told stories of his youth, and the many changes that the island has gone through since that time. As he turned the van off of the highway and onto a dirt road, he gestured towards the dense jungle and told the group

“I used to work in a sugar cane field that was once here, where these trees are now.”

The group was silent as they took in the amount of change this man had witnessed that was evidenced

in the height of the foliage alone. Luckily for us he had the keys to the many gates that divided up the large section of pasture that we were traversing in the van so he was able to take us to areas where we wouldn't otherwise have been able to go. The trail turned uphill and we eventually made our way to the top of the Kilohana Crater. We spent some time observing the views before we got back in the van and made our way back to the highway. Once we reached the highway, we turned right and headed to the old plantation town of Koloa. Our driver shared an excellent historical narration throughout this section of the tour. He seemed to be able to time his speeches perfectly, so at the end of every story he would stop the van point out the window and say:

“All that happened right....here”

We continued through Koloa and on to Poipu where we journeyed to a section of Maha'ulepu beach at the end of a long dirt road, quite far down the Maha'ulepu coast from Poipu. Here we spent some time walking around as we tried the various snacks and beverages that our driver had brought for us. The cliffs on the left side of the beach over hung extremely far, and looked like they could collapse into the sea at any moment. I got some cool pictures of this area.

After we were done at the beach we loaded back up in the van to make our way home on a “shortcut” the driver knew of. We drive up a wide dirt road up into what seemed like a sheer wall of foliage. As we got closer to the top, a small hole with a pinprick of light at the far end could be made out in the distance. Our driver explained that when the sugar cane industry was in its prime one of the main producers named “Wilcox” owned the area we were on. His fields were split by this large mountain range, and for years he was forced to drive around it using the regular county roads. This was a great hardship on his production because he had to use “street legal” sized trucks and the loads would cool down by the time they got

to the factory because of the distance around the hill (I didn’t quite understand why, but from what he said it seems that the quality of the sugar was lowered if it was allowed to cool too much after the field was burned). In addition to the longer distance to the mill, he was also racking up fines with the county for over use of the road. To remedy this situation Wilcox brought in laborers from China to dig a private tunnel large enough to fit one of his sugar cane “super haulers” that were on a similar scale to modern day monster trucks. Our guide told stories of the amount of wind these machines would create as they raced their haul back to the factory passing by the field workers at sixty plus miles an hour. As we were dropped off back at the Kilohana Plantation I couldn’t help but to feel like I had a much greater understanding of the island of Kauai. (Click here for more information about this trip or to make a booking)