Kauai, Hawaii

Kauai has chickens everywhere and closes at 7

Sunrise over the ocean from a driftwood beach on the east coast of Kauai

Kauai is not a busy island. People book it expecting Hawaii and get somewhere much quieter than that, and whether it is the best week of your life depends almost entirely on whether that is what you wanted.

The chickens

They are everywhere. Not at a farm. On the lawn outside your room.

A hen with chicks and a rooster walking across a resort lawn on Kauai

Hens with chicks behind them, roosters wandering across the grass between the buildings and the parking lot, completely unbothered by anybody. There are cats too, all over the island, living the same way.

Nobody is moving them and nobody is trying to. They are part of the place now.

The island closes at 7

By seven in the evening, that is it. Not quieter. Closed.

The locals go down to the beach, and that is where the night actually is. If you are picturing dinner at nine and somewhere to go afterward, that is a different island.

It also means you see a lot of sunrises.

Take a cacao farm tour

Chocolate does not grow the way I thought it did. It grows out of the trunk of the tree, stuck to the side of it like somebody glued it there.

A red cacao pod growing directly from the trunk of a cacao tree

I had eaten chocolate my whole life and had no idea.

They grow high and low on the same trunk, all at once.

A cacao tree with pods growing high and low on the trunk, people standing behind it for scale

And they come in different colors.

An orange cacao pod on a cacao tree

A yellow cacao pod on a cacao tree

You walk the farm, and there are far more kinds of plants on it than the one you came for. It looks like a forest of cacao.

What raw cacao actually tastes like

They open a pod and hand it to you. About thirty beans inside, each one wrapped in white pulp, and that is the part you eat.

It is stringy. It is a little like coconut, but not as sweet.

Which is exactly why it needs the sugar. You are not tasting chocolate. You are tasting the thing chocolate gets rescued from.

Ninety minutes for something that takes a month

The tour runs about an hour and a half. The process does not.

An outdoor sign titled How Chocolate is Made, listing every step from growing the trees through to eating the bar

The beans ferment in mahogany boxes for four to six days, then get washed and sun dried for three weeks. Only then are they roasted, and there is still winnowing, grinding, mixing, conching and tempering before anything looks like a bar.

A sign on the farm said Hawaii is the only state in the country that grows cacao to make chocolate. So it is not somewhere doing an impression of the tropics. It is the only place in America where the whole thing happens in one field.

Then they sit you down and feed you the results. The mango was my favorite. The sea salt was right behind it.

Kayak to a waterfall, and get in

It is tall and thin and it drops a long way into a pool you can stand up in.

A tall thin waterfall dropping into a shallow pool, with people standing and swimming at the bottom

There were about twenty other people in that pool with us. Get in anyway. Everybody there is standing under the same water and nobody minds, and you did not paddle that far to look at it.

If you go

Rent a car. Not for a day. For the week. Things are far apart, the good stuff is not near the hotels, and there is no version of this island that works without one.

If there is a cacao farm tour running while you are there, take it. Ninety minutes, it ends with chocolate, and it is one of the very few things that works for every single person you brought. The place we went does not look like it is still running, which is its own argument for doing the thing while it is in front of you. These farms are small and they come and go.

And go in expecting the quiet. The chickens, the seven o'clock, the empty roads. None of that is a flaw in the island. It is the island.