The early bird wakes up campers. Molokai has an abundance of birds! Free range chickens (with the cutest baby chicks), Nene geese, wild turkeys, sparrows, turtle doves, and tropical birds abound. The sun always kicks the roosters calling into high gear, a sign we should get up and break camp. Breakfast was fresh cut pineapple with yogurt and granola. This granola is tasty except the cranberries seem to be getting harder to chew every day...
You can see in one of the pictures the ancient Hawaiian fishpond that was at our campgrounds. Best viewing time is at low tide when the trapped fish jump and feed. There are many fishponds here on Molokai, and at least one is actively in use. You can tell by the high rock wall in the ocean and Keep Out signs.
We stopped in town before heading to our next State Park, Popuaku. We snagged our shave ice (banana/guava/pineapple flavors) and moseyed over to grab some fruit from the stand on the corner. Yesterday we bought our fresh coconuts and a pineapple there. A new addition was the sourdough(!) bread stand. Are we back in SF? We chose a slice of foccacia from their offerings.
Our drive to the next campground included a quick stop to mail some postcards at the "town" of Mauna Loa. A lot of boarded up buildings led us to believe this place was once a hub of actvity. It's unclear (to us) why most of the town is now abandoned.
We arrived at our new campsite (indoor shower, yay! No electricity, boo) and scoped out the lay of the land. A beautiful beach, but unsafe waters. No swimming here. The campsite does have convenient picnic tables and an actual sink, plus a fire pit so we can finally do some of our own cooking. However, today's lunch was mostly leftovers again. Fried chicken (addicting!), coleslaw, a wedge of delcious foccacia (rich with olive oil and greek olives) and fruit.
After setting up camp and a bit of relaxing we head back to town to get provisions for our dinner and a lunch to pack for the next day. We'll be cooking up our own dinner tonight and it's very exciting to be using local produce from Kumu farm (we stopped there on the way to town) as a part of the meal.
An interesting tidbit we also found out at the farm is that Verizon has good service all over the island. Sprint (my carrier) is good in town. AT&T (Dawn's service) is decent, but spotty. I've been blogging catch as catch can, only publishing when in town. I feel bad about you grammar and tense nazis out there...I'm sure reading these posts has your red pen itching. I may try to clean some of it up (including adding links) later, but we'll see what happens. So there ya go.
Our afternoon included a visit to the famous Molokai bakery. We found out that the midnight hot bread out the back door is from 8 to 11, good thing we didn't go at midnight last night! We got back to the campsite and after a swim at the beach down the way Kapukahehu (Dixie Maru), we were ready to have a delicious homemade dinner featuring island veggies. We roasted carrots, beets, yellow wax beans and beet greens in foil packs and they turned out great! I made a salad with local avacado, pineapple, cilantro, lime and green onions. Our beverage was a mango mojito, made using mint from our Kumu farm visit. Dessert was a brain storm, caramelized bananas! A perfect tropical dinner!
