I'd looked forward to this trip up the hill for a long time. Holualoa is a place of peace for me. I went to a church up there in the mid-late 1990s, had some great friends who walked me step by step through a tough time. They're all gone now, scattered across the world, but Holualoa still brings me peace when I'm there.
The town is still holding on to its roots. The coffee farms, the shops in repainted wooden buildings. Some folks might say it's quaint. I say it's consistency. The post office was open, as expected. I asked the postmaster about the annual Kona Coffee Festival and whether they still did a new, customized postmark each year. He said there hadn't been a postmark for some time. I always wanted to collect them every year, especially after I moved away, but it's not the same as being there to get the postmark yourself.
I strolled around for awhile, ate some great garlic sourdough bread by a dude named Wes who runs a bread shop with his wife in town. He had a tent on the side of the road. His mango-lychee pastry was excellent, too. The man has a gift. I later took shots of the old Holualoa Post Office, which still has PO boxes on its front wall. I drove mauka direction to Doris' Place. Picked up some ginger candy. I was sure Doris made this from scratch, meticulously crafting this sugary treat with medicinal qualities.
"Did you make this?"
"No," she said. "I order it."
Doris is an institution not just in Holualoa or Keauhou Mauka, but on the Big Island, period. The store got a bit crowded, which isn't hard to do being a small shop. She kept her eyes on the security camera TV screen. Times have changed. She's still strong as I remember years ago.
I was on the way out of town when I came across the coffee shop, turned around and came back. Holuakoa Cafe has a nice ambiance and visually pleasing open area. The curry lentil soup was pretty good, even better with the garlic sourdough.
I didn't stay as long as I wanted, but it didn't matter. The Cafe is also now adjoined by a restaurant, and they needed to set up for dinner. I drove north for an interview on a story about Makua Lani volleyball. The road seemed much longer than I remembered, and the rain began to fall.
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