We picked up a 95 'Chevie', (it's full beam came on when you selected reverse). With roots leading back to the French what do you expect! Our first country who drive on the wrong side, had to keep checking we were in the correct lane! We headed up to the North Shore.
On route was the Dole pineapple plantation. A fully charged homage to this sweet, mouthwatering fruit. The main attraction, aside from the gift shop, was a ride through actual pineapple plantations on the aptly named 'Pineapple Express'. Apart from some small examples in the Eden Project we couldn't think of a country where we'd actually seen them growing close up. We'd seen some gift shops on this trip but this one took the crown. It sold everything you could imagine. There was pineapple beer, pineapple biscuits and even pineapple dog food!
In 1899 at the age of 22, James Dole arrived in Honolulu. He was way ahead of his time and became known as the '"Pineapple King'' pioneering the growing of the Hawaiian pineapple. He was born in Boston and obtained his horticultural degree at Harvard university. Hawaii was the pineapple capital of the world. At it's peak in the 1930s Hawaii provided about 2/3 of the world's canned and fresh pineapple. It was Hawaii's second largest industry, second only to sugar cane. Today production does not even rank within the top ten of the world's pineapple producers. Thailand, the Philippines and Brazil are now leading the charge. Dole line the ground with plastic sheeting to prepare the soil before planting to maintain moisture. But the amount of plastic that was just left in the ground was pretty shocking. The soil itself was a deep red-ish colour caused by decomposing volcanic ash resulting in oxidizing iron in the soil. Good for pineapples but very bad for white clothing! They plant 28,000 plants per acre, all planted by hand!
Enough about pineapples. We booked into a shared house in Shark's Cove. A family business using the family house, which they no longer live in, and is now rented out by the room. John John, that's John junior the owner's son, upgraded us for free on hearing it was Fe's birthday the following day. Senior John turned up early evening to see how things were going and as we stood chatting on the front veranda senior John pointed out passing whales in the cove whilst John John, son John, fetched a couple of cold beers. With a queen size bed and a few cold beers on board we slept like a couple of babies.
Staying at the house was Janet, over for a few days from LA and Jack, here for work. He did bomb disposal work in countries all across the world at locations that are actively involved in war or at locations that have tried to protect themselves against war. Either way all pretty messy. This cool as a cue guy had plenty of stories stretching from Bosnia, Vietnam and the Congo.
No comments:
Post a Comment