Vacation part 2!* (See part 1 here)

Oahu is one of the best islands to go to if you want to experience a lot of different stuff without having to island hop. I like to think of it as a good starter island if you had to pick one to go to. It’s one of the most populated of the island chain, but you can still find some spots that aren’t super packed with tourist. Over my next couple of posts, I will go over some of the things that we did while we were on our trip.

Kahuku Farms Tour

This was something new to us that we didn’t see or do last time we visited, and it’s something I highly recommend you do if you are looking for something fun and cost-effective. The cost was a little over $30 dollars a person and included a farm fruit tasting at the end of the tour.

Kahuku Farms is home to both commercial and organic farm-to-table operations. You get to ride around the farm, looking at several of their different fields and listen as your tour guide explains all the different processes they go through to grow good, uniform “pretty” fruits and vegetables for commercial resale. It was nice to see and hear someone explaining why they farm and do the things they do, in order to keep costs lower for us, the consumers. I thought our tour guide was great and very informative, and you could tell he really had a passion for the farm.

They have several flower beds and fruit trees around their property because, in addition to growing fruit and vegetables, they also produce honey on the farm. We got a small bottle after our tour was over and I’m ready to order more online because it is such good honey!

There is also a cafe on the farm, where they only serve foods produced on the farm. Everything is organic, fresh, and seasonal. I think they said they are one of the only farms on Hawaii to grow and use their own Acai berries.

We drove through their commercial papaya groves and saw their apple banana trees, which I did not realize that bananas grew kind of upside down and that you only get one production of bananas off a tree in it’s life time.

Before the tour ended, we visited the cacao tree grove and were able to pick a few cacao pods to take back to the cafe with us to try. Cacao nibs are very popular right now in smoothie bowls and they are super high in antioxidants, so that makes them pretty good for you, if you like the taste!

Once the tour around the farm ended, we headed back up to the cafe, where our guide cut open one of the cacao pods and let everyone try a bean out of it. The white outer layer is very tart-sweet, like a Sweet tart candy (pretty obvious description yeah?) and you can just kind of suck on the outer layer before biting into it to get to the nib. I personally didn’t care for the inside part because I found the nibs to be very bitter tasting and I’m definitely a fan of sweet over that. But other people in our group really liked it, but they are also big dark chocolate fans and I’m not so that might have played a part in it, too.

To wrap up our tour we have our fresh fruit tasting, which had several different citrus fruits and papaya in it, as well as lilikoi fruit and apple banana. You could also purchase drinks and food at the cafe. I enjoyed almost all the fruits, and everyone in my group that had a banana thought they were pretty awesome (for reference, I’m weirdly allergic to bananas, so I don’t eat them). I also had one of their Lilikoi Coolers, which had lilikoi syrup, basil, lemon, and club soda in it.

It was a great tour, and it only took a few hours at most, so it’s something that you could schedule around lunchtime and still have plenty of time left to do and see other stuff in the North Shore area.

The North Shore

Another thing we did was drive up to the North Shore to see some of the really big waves and watch the kite surfers. You can see in the pictures that it was a pretty gloomy day, and we watched the rain come in directly from the ocean. It was pretty funny because it looked like it was just going to be a massive downpour-type storm, but it rained for about 8 minutes then stopped. Which was pretty much the theme for any time it decided to rain. One thing to note is that the northern side of the island tends to be wetter than the southern side, so if it’s raining at the North Shore, it’s probably not along Waikiki. So if your goal is tons of beach time, I’d look for a place to stay on the southern portion of Oahu.

The North Shore is also where the big wave competitions are held, specifically Pipeline. And you don’t really want to swim in these waters unless you’re planning on surfing because even though the waves don’t look too huge in these photos, the water is pretty rough here. We actually watched one of the kite surfers have a pretty hard wipe out and even saw a rescue truck head toward the beach. We think they managed to get back up, but the angle wasn’t the greatest for us to watch too much. We didn’t explore the North Shore area very much, which did make me a little sad, but I have several places I’d like to visit for when I go back, so there’s always something to look forward to!

*Please note that any links within this post are NOT affiliate links. I received no compensation or discounts for any of the places I’ve linked to or talked about in this blog post. Links are merely for your own information and convenience! Thank you for reading!