The Real, Old Koloa Town

On the way back from Poipu, we always tend to stop at the Lappert’s Ice Cream shop in Koloa Town. They are located in “Old Koloa Town,” a row of old wooden buildings on the main street that were once local businesses and are now quaint tourist shops. While I do recommend them as the best local and just plain best ice cream around, I must admit I think we got treated like tourists this time: small scoop and no smile.

Anyways, while we were eating our cones, we walked up and down the side-street nearby and “discovered” the real, as in genuine, old Koloa Town. Sitting back from the street behind some overgrown bushes and fences are several plantation cottages. They now look like run-down wooden shacks, but they still have some charm in the weathered wood and tin roofs. These were the places where people used to live near the local businesses.

Koloa is one of the oldest haole (foreigner, westerner, and by extension caucasian/white) settlements on Kaua’i. The first missionaries set up their churches there in the 1830’s, and the first sugar mill in Hawaii started there in 1835. There is a Koloa Heritage Trail that highlights all the points of historical interest in the area. Most recently, however, it has become just some restored buildings with tourist shops, nobody really lives on the main street anymore.

Sadly, all the houses above were fenced off and I suspect the land has been sold to developers. The newspaper recently reported on a business development planned in the “empty” land across from the old town. While that land currently has no buildings, it does have many shade trees and greenery that contribute to the relaxed atmosphere of Koloa. This is an unfortunate trend whereby a living space that has some appeal attracts tourists, which attract tourist shops, which drive out the residents.

I think the old Koloa houses should be replaced with more low-key housing so that people can live on Main street again and take advantage of walking to the post office, grocery store and library. Kaua’i needs more pedestrian-friendly communities mixed in with existing businesses and services.

Immigration from the Mainland

The continual flow of mainlanders moving to Hawaii is a hot-button issue on the islands. Many local residents, those born here and those who moved here a long time ago, feel the aloha spirit is eroding as more and more people want to share it. A recent article in the Pacific Business News out of Oahu sounds the alarm:

4 percent of Oahu housing units are owned by Mainland residents, 8 percent of Big Island housing units, with a high concentration on the west side, more than 20 percent of Maui housing units and 21 percent of Kauai housing units.

This suggests a continuation, and perhaps an intensification, of a Mainland migration to neighbor islands. State figures have previously shown that more than half the population of Kauai and Maui moved here from the Mainland.

The SMS report says 60 percent of these housing units were bought since 2000 and 71 percent of respondents spend only two to four weeks a year in their Hawaii home.

However, I think those numbers are more reflective of the growing idea of “vacation ownership” that includes condos and time-shares. I doubt time-shares are counted in those numbers, but vacation condos surely are. Few condos would really qualify as places you’d want to move to permanently. So I’m waiting to see some more descriptive numbers.

Wailua Beach

As promised, here are photos of the beach that Sonja and I go to most often because it is the closest to our house. It’s about a mile away, just across the main highway. We used to walk there, but sometimes we go at lunch and take the car to go quicker.

Looking left:

Looking right:

The beach is probably almost a half-mile long, at the far end (to the right) is the Wailua river mouth. The river makes the water murky at times, but it’s better right now in the summer. The waves here are moderate because of the wide sandy beach, but there are surf breaks over low rocks at either end. During the summer, the waves are low and you can snorkel over the rocks to the left. The main highway is right next to the beach, but you can barely see it through the vegetation and you can’t hear it all because of the waves.

For now, the beach is mostly deserted except for a few tourists during the day, and some local kids in the afternoon. That will change soon because the Coco Palms hotel on the other side of the highway will be entirely rebuilt with some 300 rooms and condos. The hotel was made famous as the setting for Elvis’s Blue Hawaii movie, but it has been closed since it was battered by hurricane Iniki in 1992. The old buildings will be torn down early 2006, and reconstruction finished by 2008, according to this article.

If you like the view, there are other condos right above the beach for sale: $675,000.

Brush Fire Extinguished

The fire was mostly out by Monday morning, but hot spots were still burning on Tuesday, probably the larger wood that caught near the ridge. Today crews were still extinguishing the last of the smoldering piles. I went to the edge of the field near the marina today and saw a crew coming back and put out the last one of them. Over 400 acres were burnt accornding to the newspaper. All in all, it was a mostly harmless fire: no people or buildings were threatened, the fire crews got some easy training, only the weeds in the abandoned cane field really got burned, and the forest reserve on the ridge was spared. Here is what it looks like now:

On a related note, almost the exact area in the photo is slated to become a Hawaiian Homeland neighborhood. This is land held in trust for the descendants of the native Hawaiians since the time of the overthrough of the independant Hawaiian nation. Once it is parceled out and utilities are installed, people who can prove at least half-Hawaiian blood can rent the land for $1 per year for a long-term lease and then build their own house. While it is relatively far from shopping and town amenities, it should be a rather low impact development. And I guess the last people you can fault for developping the island are the Hawaiian people.

In the Eye of the Beholder

I often wonder what it that attracts people to Kaua`i, what makes them vacation here and then want to move here. Of course it’s exotic, but what is hiding behind that word? Kaua`i is tropical, not cold, very different from the mainland, and I think that difference is the natural beauty of the landscape. Not that that the mainland is not beautiful, but I think it’s fair to say that Kaua`i is one of the more spectacular places with the least human intrusion (in the US) that you can get to on a commercial flight.

But is the landscape only beautiful to me? I tend to think it is a universal trait of humans to see beauty in nature, but maybe it is only in the urbanized ones, and in the end not really all of them.

So, can a freeway be beautiful?

That’s the I-280 Freeway leaving San Francisco. The sign is located just after the Highway-1 exit. Here’s an almost artistic photo of the same area. It has elegant lines, a pleasing curvature, some nice lines leading to the vanishing point, could it be beautiful?

Or is it just the concrete intestine of a giant asphalt hemorrhage in a place where natural beauty gave up the fight long ago?

Except for a few stretches with passing lanes, there are no 4-lane highways on Kaua`i, and I’m sure that makes a difference in the overall balance of beauty.