It’s a windswept, often tree-lined route that takes crowds of shoppers, restaurant-goers, sightseers and departing cruise ship passengers past eateries, spas, trinket shops, resorts and ancient churches at its northern end, and brings surfboard-clad cars past a string of highly popular beach parks and surf breaks – places like Lyman’s Surf Spot, Kahalu’u Beach Park and Magic Sands Beach – along its southern stretch. Some locals refer to its commercial section as “Big Island’s Waikiki”, after the City of Honolulu’s world-famous tourist row of postcard-level beaches, novelty restaurants and glitzy shops found on the Island of Oahu.

Most visitors experience Ali’i Drive in this order – north to south – starting the day in Kona town with gift shopping and a hearty brunch at places like Kona Inn Shopping Village, Kona Farmers’ Market, Journey Cafe Big Island and Kona Wave Cafe. One of the island’s best ethnic restaurants, featured in its own dedicated review on this blog, is Kamana Kitchen, which serves up an authentic, mouth-watering Indian cuisine menu of rich curries, aromatic rice dishes, tandoori meats and homemade naan bread at its open-air dining area located on the first floor of the Waterfront Row Shopping Center. Kamana starts serving lunch at 11:00am, and their to-go meals make for healthy, savory picnic snacks.

For souvenirs, the north end of Ali’i drive boasts plenty of choices; high-end shops like Kona Marketplace, Pacific Vibrations, Pueo Boutique, Big Island Jewelers, Hilo Hattie and Tasty Boutique, but also cheaper spots selling run-of-the-mill items like shell necklaces, Aloha print shirts, handmade bags and purses, jewelry and carved woodwork. The best deals on these trinkets and much more can be found at the craft-heavy Kona Farmers’ Market, open from 7:00am to 4:00pm Wednesday through Sunday.

The market can be easily spotted while heading in either direction along the drive; a sprawling complex of white pop-up tents inhabiting a parking lot just beyond a long, stout wall of mortared black lava rocks bordering the sidewalk. This is one of the busiest spots along Ali’i Drive, and during high tourist season and on holidays it’s common for drivers to get stuck at crosswalks here for a minute or two – no crossing signals means wandering pedestrians more or less own the road. Traffic can also get backed up in this area due to the Kona Trolleys – the colorful open-air public busses that ply the drive every hour and tend to make frequent stops. The Trolleys operate seven days a week from 7:00am to 9:00pm and service every beach park and business mentioned in this article, as well as many other locations in downtown Kona.

With full shopping bags and contented bellies, visitors to the city – whether driving rental cars or riding the Trolley – will usually head south at this point to spend the afternoon at the beach. Just a few miles outside of town the commercial facade of tidy shops, convenience stores, bustling eateries and outdoor market complexes quickly melts away, turning into an undulating coastline of sandy bays, rocky points and waves crashing over offshore reefs, lined with sporadic pockets of resorts and vacation rental homes crammed between expansive beach parks of towering palm trees, parking lots, lifeguard towers and volleyball courts. All of these spots are excellent for swimming, snorkeling, boogie boarding and sunbathing, from Pahoehoe Beach Park to Kahalu’u Bay and the many smaller informal stretches of sandy beach in between.

Usually, those new to the Kona coast will just cruise south along Ali’i Drive until they spot some promising looking beach park with a vacant parking lot and go for it. Since so many great swimming spots can be found right next to each other virtually in a line along the main road, it’s possible to visit several different beaches in a single afternoon. 

End Of The Drive and Accommodation Options

The large green golf courses of Keauhou, along with its famous Kona Coast Resort and Kona Country Club, mark the southern terminus of the drive, which promptly turns into “Ali’i Highway” before becoming Mamalahoa Bypass Road heading further south to the towns of Kealakekua and Captain Cook. 

Visitors who get an early start and find themselves in Keauhou on a Saturday morning have a great opportunity to visit Keauhou Farmers’ Market, found in the parking lot of Keauhou Shopping Center next to Bianelli’s Gourmet Pizza. The plastic folding tables at this market are usually overflowing with perfectly ripe, locally grown tropical fruits like avocados, mangos, lychee, papaya and citrus. They offer a much better selection of produce at a more reasonable price when compared to the daily Kona Farmers’ Market vendors, who seem crowded out by an army of craft and trinket sellers. The weekly Keauhou market opens at 8:00am and wraps up at noon on Saturdays.

At this point visitors have only traveled a little over half-a-dozen miles, but have visited several different beach parks, markets, souvenir shops and restaurants. They’ve tried their hand at riding a surfboard, bought much-needed sun hats, sampled some strange and exotic new fruits, spotted dolphins and sea turtles milling around in the bay, and caught some sun at a beach of white sand and bright turquoise water that should be in a brochure.

Few people come to Big Island for the “luxury” Hawaiian vacation experience. It is, after all, considered an “outer-island”, largely rural, full of country folk and devoid of mega-condos and never-ending suburban sprawl. Most people make the extra airplane jump out here to see things like magnificent waterfalls, smoking volcanic craters, raw black sand beaches, striking rainbows, towering lush green valleys and orchards full of tropical fruit. But for those wanting to eat well and stay well while exploring all of these quintessentially Big Island sights, and even to bring a special piece of the island home as a memento or gift for loved ones, Ali’i Drive is the closest thing the island has to Honolulu-level lavishness. 

For accommodation, it features some of the most centrally located, best-outfitted, and highest-rated lodging on the island, including two and three-star spots like Courtyard by Marriott King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel, Holiday Inn Express & Suites Kailua-Kona, Kona Islander Inn, Royal Kona Resort, Club Wyndham Kona Hawaiian Resort, WorldMark Kona, Kona Tiki, and Club Wyndham Royal Sea Cliff. Toward the drive’s southern end is the 4-star hotel Aston Kona By The Sea, located right next to the beach and surrounded by tranquil forests. It’s an easy walk from this hotel along the shore to Ali’i Saltwater Swimming Pool.

In addition to hotels, there are countless less-formal vacation rentals stretching up and down Ali’i Drive and beyond, from beach villas to condos to guest houses, many of which are pinned on Google maps and found on sites like Airbnb and VRBO. As a general rule, accommodation tends to become cheaper the farther you go away from the drive, and with Kona towns’s easy drive-ability and relatively efficient and wide-reaching bus service, it’s possible to get a room in a farther-flung neighborhood and still take full advantage of everything Ali’i Drive has to offer.

How To Get There:

For those wanting to explore the entire length of Ali’i Drive, its northern terminus is located at the bottom of Palani Road, roughly three blocks down the hill from Kona Walmart, next to a long flat-topped rock wall running along Kailua Bay. Ululani’s Shave Ice, Big Kahuna Beach Grill, Seiji’s Sushi and Cherry Hill Kona Coffee Outlet can all be found near the start of the drive, and Gertrude’s Jazz Bar and the historic Hulihe’e Palace are immediately after.

Moku’aikaua Church, Hawaii’s oldest Christian church dating back to the early 1800s, is an easily recognizable landmark located at the top of Ali’i Drive, with its tall white arch and walls of roughly hewn lava boulders sticking out from the much more modern buildings surrounding it.

The Hawaiian word “ali’i” (AH-LEE-EE) means royalty. Ali’i Drive got its name because Hulihe’e Palace was once used by the Royal Family of Hawaii as their home, and the nearby Ahuena Heiau was where King Kamehameha, the first monarch to rule over a united Hawaiian archipelago, spent his retirement. Today the palace is often used as an outdoor music and art venue, where sweetly sung Hawaiian songs drift out onto the sidewalk accompanied with riffs of iconic “slack key” guitar. At one end of the palace grounds is Niumalu Beach, a tiny speck of white sand offering a great photo opportunity of the bay.

Important Note: This stretch of the drive is used as part of the racecourse for the Ironman World Championship held in Kailua-Kona annually, usually in the beginning of October. During the events, the road is closed to vehicle traffic and congestion in the city becomes pretty extreme.

Where Hilo’s market succeeds in its variety and quality of fresh fruit, produce, coconuts, and other assorted farm goodies like honey, macadamia nuts and coffee, it falls short of an equally diverse clothing, handicraft and souvenir section catering to visitors hunting for something to take home to remember their trip by, or to give as gifts to friends and family members. Farther down Kamehameha Avenue, there are plenty of high-end souvenir and fine-art stores selling everything from volcano-themed fused glass pieces to handmade pottery to watercolor landscape paintings, but they are often being sold here for “gallery” prices.

So, budget-minded Big Island visitors looking for a place to pick up souvenirs with more of a craft fair vibe, and without spending a stack of money, should check out Kona Farmers’ Market. It’s located off of Ali’i Drive near the looping seaside commercial road’s northern end, where it intersects Hualalai Road across the street from Hale Halawai Park, and is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 7:00am to 4:00pm. 

The market inhabits an oceanfront parking lot full of white pop-up tents, found beyond a long shoulder-high wall of mortared black lava rocks running parallel to Ali’i Drive for a few blocks. Laid out on plastic folding tables beneath the tent eaves is a little bit of everything: hand-carved tiki statuettes, feathered wooden masks, shell necklaces, aloha shirts, fine jewelery, as well as mats, baskets, boxes, belts and hats made from wicker and woven palm leaves. Some locally made goods are strikingly inexpensive: five dollars for a hand-woven sliding gift box made of palm straw; just a few dollars more for a zippered sunglass case of the same material.

Hanging from the corner of one stall’s tent is a collection of “Ikaika Warrior Helmets” – feathered and beaded carved coconut shells in colors of turquoise, auburn and gold. The shells are lacquered and glisten in the sunlight, bringing out their deep brown colors and fine, smooth grains. Another shop is selling carved wooden turtles and dolphins piled in small plastic cups, interspersed with necklaces and bracelets featuring similar wooden carvings of the island’s iconic sea life. Then there are the flower leis – both plastic and real – hanging on display racks in bunches, featuring the many different colors of the legendary hibiscus flower, along with strings of smaller, sweet smelling flowers like plumeria and “puakenikeni”.

The lei stands give way to the flower sellers, whose elegant arrangements feature blood-red heart-shaped anthuriums, aromatic torches of white ginger flowers, heliconias, orchids and much more. Some stands have combined together displays of flowers, fruits and veggies, with the produce laid out on tables and the flowers below in five-gallon plastic buckets of loose stems grouped together on the pavement.

And to Kona Farmers’ Market’s credit, its sprawling oceanfront parking lot market space of several dozen white pop-up tents does feature a handful of stalls selling fresh tropical fruit. Their folding tables are strewn with similar neatly stacked pyramids of perfectly ripe produce as those found in Hilo, just in much less abundance and sometimes crowded out by the ranks of trinket sellers. At the sometimes hard-to-find produce table, there are usually several different West Hawaii specialties being offered up like Kona-grown mangoes, jumbo avocados the size of softballs, and multiple varieties of papayas, as well as Kona and Ka’u coffee, macadamia nuts and small-batch honey in its many different enticing golden hues.

But there are also noticeable absences when compared to its more farmer-oriented East-side counterpart: Kona’s market doesn’t have a regular full-service coconut seller, meaning visitors won’t get the opportunity to snap a video of a burly local swinging a machete cutting away the nut’s husk and dropping in a straw before serving it to a delighted customer. There also aren’t as many of the staple crops which make up traditional Hawaiian cuisine available, either, such as the bulky, starchy roots of the taro plant known as “corms,” the soft golden-brown globes of sweet-smelling breadfruit, or the leaves and roots of the much-beloved purple sweet potato. Nevertheless, occasionally these types of crops do make their way onto the assorted folding tables found along Ali’i Drive, and some foodie visitors do get lucky in being able to plan a night of traditional Hawaiian cooking around what’s available at the market just down the street. But in general, Hilo’s cornucopia of staple crops is much more varied, reliable and easy-to-find.

A One-Of-A-Kind Gift, and A Show Of Support For Big Island-Based Craftspeople

Many of the locals on Big Island, whether native Hawaiian or not, are talented craftsmen and craftswomen who make supplemental income selling their wares at informal community markets. Wages on the island are famously low, so residents tend to get creative and sometimes have several different side-hustles going at once, often including staffing tables at farmer’s markets to hawk their wares. Everyone seems to be involved part-time with growing or making something in some small-scale enterprise, whether it’s keeping bees or tending fishponds, growing fruit or weaving palm fronds, collecting coconuts or searching for shells. In the case of the foraged coconuts, drawing on some ingenuity and skill they turn these cast-off items into handsomely polished feathered helmets, bought up by the suitcase load along Ali’i Drive as fond memories of Hawaii for fifteen dollars a piece.

In their spare time, other locals specialize in wood carving, basket weaving, lei making and shell and flower arrangements, taking advantage of the abundance of colorful wild and farm-grown flora and natural materials like hardwood, lava rock and collected shells. All of this makes the handmade items for sale at Kona Farmers’ Market more than just a material gift – it’s a piece of Big Island handiwork that often times shares a long history of traditional Hawaiian craftsmanship, and that goes to support the livelihoods of real local artisans.

So, visitors can feel good about spending their money here, and will often be surprised at how far it goes. It would be easy to find thoughtful gifts for parents, siblings, spouses, children – even assorted uncles and aunts – at Kona Farmers’ Market and make it out of the parking lot having spent less than one hundred dollars. This makes it a great one-stop-shop for loading up on mementos before heading to the airport, or for finding that exceptional piece of handiwork to decorate the office, car, living room or dorm room. The market’s vendors are notoriously non-pushy, most acting more or less disinterested in customers unless asked a question about a specific item. This makes for a very laid-back, no-stress trinket shopping experience with plenty of curious exotic fruits to snack on while you browse.

How To Get There

Kona Farmers’ Market is located just off of the town’s main coastal commercial thoroughfare known as “Ali’i Drive”, which winds down the coast southward to the small beach resort and golf course town of Keauhou. The market is located near the northern terminus of Ali’i Drive, across the street from a well-manicured waterfront park and green space known as Hale Halawai Park, which abuts the calm, inviting turquoise waters of Oneo Bay.

It’s found on the same city block as the Kailua-Kona Public Library, at the corner of Ali’i Drive and Hualalai Street, within a stones throw of several excellent restaurants, shopping centers and places to stay. Neighboring the market along that same northern stretch of Kona’s tourist row is the Kona Inn Shopping Village, Kona Islander Inn, Kailua Village Condos, Kamana Kitchen Indian Cuisine, Papa Kona Restaurant and Bar, Kai Eats and Drinks, Pa’akai Poke and Deli and many others. There’s even bicycle, snorkel, beach and board rentals found one block away at the rental shop called Boss Frog’s. 

In the end, its central location makes Kona Farmers’ Market an ideal jumping off point for an afternoon of sunny beaches, breezy bike rides and casual shopping around Kona Town, and a great morning stop to pick up fresh fruit before a day trip of jungle hikes or excursions to the island’s many far-flung idyllic beaches. If visitors looking for trinkets and fruit happen to unluckily find themselves in Kona Town on a Monday or Tuesday when the market is closed, have no fear! A quick drive over Saddle Road will bring you to Hilo’s market, located in a hard-to-miss spot along its iconic bayfront and open every day of the week from 7:00am to 3:00pm. 

There simply is no better place on the Big Island of Hawaii to feast on mounds of buttery, world-renown and locally-grown Hawaiian macadamia nuts than at Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company’s spacious showroom located in the hills above the small West Hawaii port town of Kawaihae.

It’s a high-ceiling storefront awash in sunlight filtering through its ranks of bay windows, which illuminates a maze of tables, counters, bins and display racks overflowing with cans and pouches of the company’s namesake nut in a dizzying variety of island-inspired flavors. Within seconds of stepping through the door into what’s informally known as the “nut house”, visitors are tempted with free samples of island-grown coffee from its various coffee growing regions, such as Kona, Ka’u and Hilo, all with their own distinctive aromas, flavors and bodies.

The coffee stand gives way to a small cafe serving up full-sized espressos, smoothies and scoops of homemade ice cream. The air inside the showroom smells downright heavenly: wafts of freshly brewed coffee mixed with the smell of buttery peanut brittle and roasted nuts dusted with delectable toppings, which leads many visitors with rumbling stomachs to seek out the store’s long wooden table filled with free samples of its macadamias in flavors both sweet and savory.

“There simply is no better place on Big Island to feast on mounds of buttery, world-renown and locally-grown macadamia nuts than at Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company”

This samples station is the focal point of the entire facility for most visitors. They crowd around the table gingerly working small metal tongs, picking the nuts out of larger bowls two and three at a time and dropping them into the disposable paper cups provided. Some seem partial to the sweet varieties; Kona Coffee Glazed, Butter Rum Glazed and Coconut Glazed, and gleefully fill up their respective cups again and again with the glossy sugar-coated delights, scarfing them down by the handful. 

Others like the savory flavors best; Island Onion, “Chili Peppah”, Wasabi, Soy Sauce – even SPAM flavored for the truly adventurous foodies who want to try something distinctly Hawaiian. This group does a better job of savoring each nut, but nonetheless can still be spotted upending their cups from time to time with a satisfying crunch as if to take a shot of liquor. Then there are the visitors who are nut-purists, who forego the fancy sugar and spice variations and focus their attention on the sample bowls full of lightly salted and salt-free dry-roasted macadamias. These nuts are in their most un-doctored form, with the subtle buttery flavors brought out by the roasting process really coming through, not overpowered by the tastes of onions and chilis and soy sauce.

Some people never make it past the free samples, and spend most of their time in the showroom lingering around them hoping that uniformed employees will materialize from behind a side-door and refill the bowls as they do from time to time. Others load up several cup-fulls and take off down the aisles, browsing the different sized packages of the same nuts they are simultaneously trying, found in sizes ranging from snack-size pouches to formidable five pound bulk bags. They find other island-made products, too, interspersed with the cans, bags and pouches of nuts: honey, granola, cooking oils, chocolates, cookies, bags of bulk coffee and enticing-looking kettle corn.

In one corner of the showroom is the entrance to a long, wide hallway lined with still more racks and baskets of goodies lining one wall. The hallway’s opposite wall is a made up of a row of windows looking out onto the factory floor where employees adorned in hair caps and gloves dart to and fro running the network of curious looking machines with funny names: Lid Capper, Flavor Panner, Can Labeler. This is what is called “The Cannery”.

At the bottom of every window is a placard giving a brief explanation of each machine’s purpose, and visitors making their way from window to window down the hall can get a good step-by-step idea of how macadamias go from bulk raw shelled nuts to the flavorful morsels found in their sample cups. Pouches and bags of finished product slowly roll off the assembly line in a slightly hypnotizing and unquestionably mouth-watering procession. Soon they will be packed up and shipped off to supermarkets and grocery stores across the entire island, as well as to neighboring islands, the U.S. mainland, and to the doorsteps of international customers on nearly every continent.

At the end of the hallway is a mini-theater of wrought iron chairs set in rows facing a flatscreen television. A short narrated informational film about the farming and processing side of the business is shown on a continuous loop, which helps to fill in the information gaps left by the placards, and to answer the frequently asked questions about nut aficionados. The theater is the natural endpoint to the self-guided tour, and from there visitors usually meander back past the factory windows and informational placards to the sample table to load up one more time before hitting the checkout counter.

A Boon To Hawaiian Agriculture, And A Great Place To Shop For Gifts

Macadamia nuts are native to Australia, where Aboriginal peoples utilized the hearty, prolific wild trees as a crucial source of “bush food”. It wasn’t until the late 19^th Century that an Australian plant collector and sugarcane plantation manager named William Purvis came to Hawaii’s Big Island with the archipelago’s first macadamia nut sapling in his luggage. Purvis planted it along the island’s eastern Hamakua Coast, where legend tells that it is still growing to this day.

Hawaii became the first large-scale mac nut producer in history, and for decades held the title of biggest crop yield. Since then, competition from countries like Australia, South Africa and China have bumped Hawaii from the top slot, although the tens of millions of pounds of in-shell nuts produced every year in the islands is still a remarkable feat considering their tiny geographic size. Today, there are hundreds of independent small-scale growers across the state who harvest tens of millions of dollars worth of nuts every year.

Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company is supplied by roughly 200 different independent Big Island nut farms, many of which are multi-generational and multi-family enterprises that depend entirely on the orchards for their livelihoods. So, visitors to the company’s showroom can feel good about the products they are buying; that they’re supporting local small-scale farmers making a living on an island with limited economic opportunities for many people, as well as the roughly 60 full-time employees who run the factory and showroom.

It’s also a great place to find gifts for friends and family members back home. Many of the tables in the showroom are taken up by gift displays, from assorted samplers of nuts and chocolates to colorfully painted cookie tins wrapped up in bows. The tins, adorned with motifs like beautiful tropical flowers, sea turtles, and dolphins are sure to still delight long after the scrumptious morsels inside have long since been eaten. There are neatly stacked pyramids of individual dark, milk and white chocolates, some of which feature mac nut “fines”, in their miniature plastic jars. For visitors who find themselves planning a trip to Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company during the holidays, keep an eye out for table displays of seasonal chocolate peppermint bark made with macadamia nut pieces and either milk or dark chocolate.

How To Get There

Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company’s factory and showroom is located along Maluokalani Street, which is found off of Akoni Pule Highway, otherwise known as Highway 270, roughly one mile northwest of the small industrial Big Island port town of Kawaihae (“kah-vie-high”).

It can be a bit tricky to find on the first visit, partly because the factory is located in a part of town that seems incongruous to an upscale foodie destination. Surrounding the factory are car repair shops, concrete companies, auto detailing businesses and other industrial type stores, leading many newcomers to wonder if they are in the right place. But fear not, as the long, curving and slightly steep one-lane concrete road leading to the factory’s parking lot will eventually come into view, with its border of well-manicured hedges.

It’s a great place to stop and pick up car, beach and hiking snacks, some truly gourmet coffee and perhaps a few small gifts for envious friends back home. And Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company is conveniently located just up the road from some spectacular Kona-side beaches including Puako – otherwise known as “Beach 69” – Mauna Kea Beach, Hapuna Beach State Recreation Area and Spencer Beach Park. It’s also very near Pu’ukohola Heiau National Historic Site – the massive stone castle by the sea – which is covered in its own dedicated article. 

The alluring perfume of its fresh-baked shortbreads greets visitors all the way out in the parking lot, where wafts of the buttery, inviting aroma stream out from behind the nondescript building and make stomachs grumble. The smell only gets more intense upon entering the product showroom – an elaborately decorated and well air-conditioned maze of colorful candy boxes stacked in neat piles on shelves.

Just a few minutes spent perusing the cornucopia of Hawaii-inspired treats and trying to keep track of which one sounds the most delicious is enough to make your head spin: cookies, brownies, biscotti, toffee, jars of honey, locally grown macadamia nuts and coffee beans covered in chocolate, macadamia nut shortbread, chocolate covered animal crackers, even the traditional Japanese dessert made with sweet bean paste known as “manju”.

Most of these goodies are offered in several different flavors, and in versions like milk, dark or white chocolate-dipped. For example, the macadamia nut shortbreads alone are available in coconut, lemon, pineapple, taro, coffee, green tea, chocolate chip and more. The factory even bakes plain butter shortbread without the macadamias for customers frequenting its showroom who have nut allergies.

And just when visitors to Big Island Candies think they have spotted the most delectable-sounding goodie of them all, they come upon the shop’s holy grail: chocolate-dipped brownies. And even these come in several different flavors, including a “milk chocolate-dipped peanut butter brownie” that seems the have the most tantalizing name of them all. Then there are the specialty brownies for those wanting to explore new takes on the classic treat: soft and fruity passionfruit mochi brownies or the rich, pungent and aromatic dark chocolate-dipped coffee brownies.

After some length, the shelves of sweets turn from shortbreads and brownies to cookies, and more brightly colored boxes of purples, browns and greens assembled in their neat stacks appear: gingerbread cookies, Hawaiian salt cookies, bite-sized macadamia nut cookies, chocolate chip mac nut cookies, guava cookies, Kona coffee cookies – even cranberry mac nut oatmeal cookies. Then come the specialty chocolates: milk chocolate macadamia nut toffee, dark and milk chocolate-covered mac nuts, crispy rice chocolate crunch – and for the really adventurous, Hawaiian Red Chili toffee. Big Island Candies even sells homemade chocolate macadamia nut rocky road, crafted with a healthy amount of mini marshmallows.

Before long, visitors usually find themselves staring through the store’s transparent wall out onto the factory floor, where blue-gloved employees wearing green shirts, hair caps and facemasks tend workstations carefully dipping stacks of shortbread and brownies into vats of warm chocolate and laying them out on sheets to dry. 

There are dozens of individual stations scattered throughout the factory floor, many with signs hanging overhead stating their purpose: baking, hand-dipping, packaging, quality inspection. These are undoubtedly to aid the spectators standing behind the glass, who might otherwise see just a bustling beehive of activity of freshly dipped treats being wheeled on carts from place to place around the immaculate room. Here it’s not uncommon to see groups of young children with faces pressed up against the glass, marveling and drooling at the sight of tubs of liquid chocolate, like something out of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory. 

A Curious Piece Of Hilo History With A World-Class Gift Shop

Big Island Candies was founded by Allan Ikawa and his wife Irma in 1977, investing every penny they had to launch the confection company. They started out very small: a shrink wrap machine and a chocolate melter pored over for long days within a small warehouse along the city’s industrial district. 

They experienced many setbacks over a half-century in business, but still kept at it and slowly yet steadily managed to build the company into a well-renowned, multi-island brand, which to this day still uses 100 percent Big Island-sourced coffee and macadamia nuts while creating its vast catalog of goodies. All this makes the candy shop a sweet, enduring fixture of Hilo’s foodie scene, a one-stop-shop for gift-seeking visitors wanting to bring back something truly special, and a great pit stop on an around-the-island road trip to load up on beach, car and hiking snacks. After all, no Big Island gift basket is truly complete without a box or two of locally made, mouthwatering shortbread in decadent tropical flavors like passionfruit, guava and Kona coffee. 

Tables of gift baskets are scattered around the showroom floor, many including assortments of the most popular sweets. The largest gift basket contains ten boxes and four bags of everything from biscotti to brownies to cookies to chocolate covered macadamia nuts. A smaller version of the basket features seven boxes and four bags and includes some specialty items like cocoa-dusted almonds and chocolate covered Kona coffee beans. The baskets are customizable, too, so shoppers can pick and choose which treats they think their loved ones will like the most. 

Then there are smaller, beautifully designed gift boxes tied up with colored ribbon, which come in prints like: Flower Focus, Cherry Blossom, Torch Ginger, Goldfish, Purple Wonder, Amauu Fern and Green Maidenhair. These are eye-catching, travel-friendly samplers of all the delicious things Big Island Candies has to offer, perfect for envious friends and family members back home. They make scrumptious gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, homecomings and graduations, and their ornate boxes decorated with iconic Hawaiian plants, flowers and fish are such to be treasured for years to come.

For those visiting Big Island Candies who haven’t had a chance to try the island’s world-famous coffee yet, you’re in luck! One corner of the showroom is inhabited by a small cafe serving up steaming cups of fresh-brewed Kona and Ka’u coffee grown on small farms on the island’s western and southern flanks. The sound of a whining blender fills the store from time to time as barristers mix up smoothies in flavors like strawberry, mango, cappuccino, banana and pina colada – most of them made with Big Island’s world-famous tropical fruit. The cafe even offers “ice cream pies” – individual-serving frozen pies made with Big Island Candies’ signature original cookie or chocolate shortbread crust and the island of Maui’s very own Roselani Ice Cream.

And nothing rounds out a one-of-a-kind gift basket of Hawaiian chocolate and shortbread goodness better than a Big Island Candies-branded reusable tote; a way to savor the sweet memories even after all the cookies, brownies and chocolates are long gone. These are very inexpensive – just one or two dollars per bag, and they make terrific last-minute gifts for candy lovers.

The sweetshop’s goodies are so well-renown, in fact, that they’ve had to open another retail store within the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu to keep up with demand, which offers the same fare as its Hilo flagship factory and showroom located on Hinano Street.

How To Get There

Big Island Candies is located roughly two blocks west of the entrance to Hilo’s Airport Road leading to Hilo International Airport (ITO), and half a block from Hilo Urgent Care, just off of Highway 11 otherwise known as Hawaii Belt Road.

The street address of the candy factory and showroom is 585 Hinano Street, where visitors will know they are in the right place simply based on the alluring smell of shortbread wafting out to greet them in the parking lot. Big Island Candies’ Hilo location is open daily from 8:30am to 5:00pm, and most of its offering of sweets and treats can be found within the company’s online product catalog found at bigislandcandies.com. Orders can be placed online as well as over the phone and can be shipped anywhere in the world. 

For those who missed the chance to pick up sweetbreads, cookies, chocolates, toffee and brownies while they were on Big Island, have no fear! The company’s second location is found at 1450 Ala Moana Boulevard within Honolulu’s Ala Moana Shopping Center on the island of Oahu. This satellite location is open from 10:00am to 8:00pm Monday through Saturday, and from 10:00am to 6:00pm on Sundays.

After a busy day of candy sampling, shortbread smelling and gift basket designing, visitors to Big Island Candies will no doubt work up an appetite, and thankfully there are several excellent restaurants within walking distance of the sweets shop, including the locally beloved Hawaiian Style Cafe Hilo, Sakura Sushi and Grill, Sombat’s Fresh Thai Cuisine, Liquid Life Hilo and the Hilo Lunch Shop. “The Full 9 Yards”, another locally owned candy shop with plenty of Hawaiian flare, is located less than a block away from Big Island Candies within Manono Street Marketplace, and is open Tuesday thru Saturday 10:00am to 5:00pm. 

This is Banyan Drive, Big Island’s take on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And instead of golden stars imprinted into its sidewalks, here the celebrities of the mid-20^th Century planted tiny saplings of the curious and exotic species of fig native to India known as the “banyan”. Nearly a hundred years later, these trees have grown up into towering clusters of branches woven together into impossible patterns, with thick, writhing trunks and a host of ferns and creeping vines taking up residence in their crevices.

Banyans are found in rows on both sides of the drive, with a wide grassy median splitting the traffic lanes planted with still more of the peculiar-looking trees. And although their trunks are spaced just two or three to a block, the imposing green masses of their canopies still somehow manage to reach out and mingle overhead, carried along by crooked branches stretching out in all directions, casting much-welcome shade onto the sidewalks bordering the road – even on hot, humid summer days when a blazing East Hawaii sun beats down from directly overhead. In places, dog-walkers and joggers look up at the canopy and cannot tell where one banyan stars and another ends; it has all become a single tangled mass of writhing branches and fanning leaves, like a gigantic green tunnel speckled with patches of blue sky showing through the intricate bramble.

More than 50 of these trees can be found skirting around the peninsula, some considerably larger than others. The most formidable specimens are downright astounding – some found along the main section of the boulevard appear to be pushing 100 feet tall with massive burrows found in their trunks large enough to serve as a hiding place for a full-grown human.

Others feature wide curtains of aerial roots, which grow out from the branches of older trees and make their way towards the ground, eventually maturing into thick, woody trunks which lend support to the main tree. Biologists call these “prop roots”. Left to its own devices with little sunlight competition, the banyan’s prop roots will develop over a large area of ground and grow to resemble a grove of trees, even though every seemingly separate trunk is still connected to the primary one through an impossible tangle of criss-crossing roots. When considering this fact, the trees along Banyan Drive start to appear relatively tame, especially compared to specimens like the one adjacent to Rainbow Falls within Hilo’s Wailuku River State Park which is a veritable banyan “forest” overgrown to a downright mindboggling degree. 

Scientists usually place banyan trees into a group called “strangler figs”, which begin their lifecycle as a tiny seed dropped into the crown of another tree. The seed sprouts and sends roots down and around the stem of its host, eventually reaching the ground and fusing together to form what’s called a “pseudo-trunk” – a process which gives the appearance that it is “strangling” its host. This process can create another curious sight when the host tree does indeed die and rot away, and the resulting fig tree trunk is hollow at its core.

Planted By U.S. Presidents, Sports Legends, Aviation Pioneers and Hawaiian Royalty 

Each one of the towering trees found along Banyan Drive features a small, hand-carved wooden placard indicating the date it was planted and by whom.

Stroll for a few blocks taking note of the placards along the way, and it reads like a who’s who of mid-20^th Century celebrity; There are banyans planted by jazz icon and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, and former U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Possibly the most popular banyan among visitors is the one with a placard for George Herman Ruth, otherwise known as baseball legend Babe Ruth, located in a prominent spot near the entrance to the Grand Naniloa Hotel – arguably Hilo’s most luxurious and well-situated oceanfront high-rise.

The idea of planting saplings along the peninsula was thought up by several local park commissioners in 1933, helped along by the planned arrival of President Franklin Roosevelt in Hilo on a steamship tour of the Hawaiian Islands the next year. A modern road was built through the patch of young trees, which before that point had been made of only crushed coral. Babe Ruth made the journey to Big Island later that year and planted his own tree, along with several movie stars of the era.

Roughly a dozen banyans were added to the growing plot every year into the mid-1930s, after which the frequency began to taper off. Only two trees were planted in 1941, and a decade late in 1952, Richard Nixon – at the time only a senator – planted the year’s solitary banyan. Since then, a small handful of planting have been done to replace missing trees, but it’s been more than half a century since ground has been broken there to accommodate a new banyan.

Hilo’s waterfront has been struck by several massive tsunamis over the past century, with significantly destructive waves crashing into the peninsula in 1946, 1960 and 1975. In addition to houses, businesses and roads along the coastline being washed away, these walls of crashing water have claimed a handful of Banyan Drive’s living landmarks, too, leaving only 50 surviving banyans.

All of this makes a cruise through the towering, imposing trees today a journey back through the pages of history; cyclists, joggers, beach-goers and dog-walkers casually passing by a shady spot where, nearly a hundred years ago, some larger-than-life legend planted a tiny sapling on a volcanic island which they had to reach by steamship. And although all of the people named on the wooden placards found along the drive are long gone, the strange and fantastic-looking Indian fig trees they planted long ago continue to bear witness to their legacies, all found along a sleepy oceanside boulevard within Big Island’s largest city.

Among the string of fancy hotels, beach parks, restaurants and shady sidewalks is Banyan Gallery, a small artist studio beckoning to visiting art aficionados with an impressive array of beautifully crafted pieces mirroring much of the natural beauty and splendor of Hawaii Island. This is a great place to pick up handicrafts, souvenirs, postcards, jewelry, and even high-end fine art pieces created by members of the island’s vibrant and far-reaching arts community.

How To Get There

Banyan Drive is located just north of the intersection of Highway 11, otherwise known as Hawaii Belt Road, and Kamehameha Avenue along the waterfront of the main East Hawaii Island town of Hilo. It is a one-mile-long near-loop skirting along the shoreline of the city’s Waiakea Peninsula, beginning at Naniloa Golf Course and passing by Reed’s Bay Beach Park, Hilo Reed’s Bay Hotel, the Grand Naniloa Hotel Hilo, the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel, the humble Banyan Mini Mart convenience store, and ending at the elegantly landscaped seaside recreation spot known as Liliuokalani Gardens. 

Stay straight at the intersection of Highway 11 and Kamehameha Avenue to access the main entrance to the drive, or come in the back way by turning right onto Lihiwai Street one block down from the intersection. The best way to experience the historical legacy and natural beauty of Banyan Drive is by walking it; this gives visitors an opportunity to see the trees up-close and admire the intricacy of their woven roots and intertwined canopies. Opting to go on foot also makes it much easier to spot the carved wooden placards and learn which old-time celebrity planted the banyan growing next to it.

But for those on a time crunch or looking to cover more ground, there’s a stand of rental e-bikes at the intersection of Banyan Drive and Lihiwai Street which are perfect for cruising the wide, flat sidewalks running in both directions along the rows of trees. A popular bike path leads along the waterfront connecting the parks, hotels and restaurants of Banyan Drive with downtown Hilo and its iconic bayfront commercial district of windswept, colorful shops and beloved farmer’s market.

Locally renown restaurants found along Banyan Drive include Coconut Grill, Ponds Hilo, Verna’s Drive-In, Hilo Bay Cafe, and the world-famous Suisan Fish Market – arguably the best place on the island to enjoy the ubiquitous Hawaiian entree of diced, seasoned raw fish called “poke”. Nearby attractions within walking distance of the drive include Liliuokalani Gardens, Hilo Bayfront Beach Park, Reed’s Bay Beach Park and Coconut Island, otherwise known in Hawaiian as “Moku Ola.”

It began with local fishermen in the islands saving the cut-off parts of their catch and adding seasonings to them to eat as a snack. In the 1970s, poke became increasingly popular and eventually evolved into an entire subsection of contemporary Hawaiian cuisine. It is most commonly prepared with cubes of yellowfin tuna also known as “ahi”, and skipjack tuna called “aku”, along with embellishments like green onions, sesame oil, Maui onions, sea salt and the pungent seaweed known as “limu”. Some poke batches are seasoned with soy sauce, wasabi paste, chili peppers and fish eggs, while a more traditional form includes roasted, salted ground candlenut.

Most of these varieties and several more are served up daily at Suisan Fish Market, which has been selling fish and poke out of the same location at the mouth of the Wailoa River along Hilo’s bayfront for several generations. The business has seen its fair share of setbacks, including the crashing of two massively destructive tsunamis into the city’s usually-sheltered bay of rocky black sand beaches in both 1946 and 1960. But the owners stuck it out, and over the years have seen Suisan grow to become the largest food distribution company on Big Island. 

Suisan runs warehouses all over the island, but maintains its original windswept riverfront fish market as a place for retail sales, and informally as a historic landmark. The store smells strongly of fish immediately upon entering, undoubtedly a testament to the freshness of the catch, but for people who are bothered by the smell it could be a bit too much. Visitors first come upon refrigerated display cases full of vacuum sealed large fresh fish cuts of various species, informed by the plastic notecards attached to the racks. This is the place to pick up a mouth-watering ahi steak for a backyard barbecue, or to find a juicy slab of mahi-mahi for an unforgettable batch of fish tacos.

Beyond the full cuts of fish is another, larger display case crammed with all of Suisan’s prepared food. Several different types of classic poke are available, made with raw ahi, aku, hamachi, and salmon. Then there are the many side dishes, like crab and lobster salad, kim chee, octopus, sweet potato and seaweed salad. All the to-go bowls and plates they serve include a side of either brown rice or “hapa” – meaning mixed white and brown rice. Their pricing is based on number of scoops: 1-Choice Bowl, 2-Choice Bowl, “Small Kine” Bowl and Plate, all with their corresponding number of side dishes. 

All these delicacies are available for purchase by the pound in bulk containers, too, and sometimes Suisan will only sell certain varieties by the pound. Refrigerated cases at the far end of the store contain packages of dried fish and containers of freshly made poi, as well as smaller pre-packaged portions of fish steaks and cubes. Much of its inventory is based on availability, as the company has built its business around the freshest fish possible, so it’s not uncommon to see half of the display cases empty, especially after the mid-day lunch rush.

How To Get There:

Suisan Fish Market can be found on Lihiwai Street along Hilo’s iconic waterfront, just off of Kamehameha Avenue. Look for the blue building with glowing neon red sign right next to the river’s mouth. The shop is situated half a block from the eastern entrance to Banyan Drive, the historic winding thoroughfare of towering banyan trees, picturesque beach parks and the city’s most luxurious hotels. It’s open from 9:00am to 3:00pm on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and closed on Sunday and Wednesday. Other sights within walking distance of Suisan include the serene and always green Liliuokalani Gardens, Reed’s Bay Beach Park, and the palm-lined rocky outcrop jutting out into the bay called Coconut Island, or “Moku Ola” (Island of Life) in Hawaiian. 

Its glass display cases are crammed with tray after tray of turnovers, cheesecakes, pies, eclairs, cinnamon rolls and pastries of all sorts, including an army of the powdered-sugar-dusted Portuguese doughnuts known as “malasadas”, with their various types of enticing-looking fillings. These are highly popular across the state, with many roadside food trucks serving the piping hot, sugar-dusted goodies to locals and visitors alike. Some of the malasadas at Punalu’u Bake Shop are partway dipped in what looks like lemon frosting, while others are the traditional airy puffs with flaky crust and only a light dusting of sugar.

The mesmerizing scent of all these delicious baked goods greets visitors out in the parking lot. The entire compound: bakery, open-air restaurant, gazebos, gift shop, all are inundated with the smell of baking sweet bread being made on a commercial scale. Wafts of the heavenly, buttery aroma drift across the road, making their way out to the highway and drawing in hungry drivers.

Visitors following their noses are first greeted by a colorfully painted wooden sign hanging over the concrete walkway leading to the bakery, featuring the shop’s stylized logo of a yellow hibiscus flower and its primary claim to fame: “Welcome to the southernmost bakery in the USA!”

And indeed it is: Situated at 19 degrees north latitude, Punalu’u Bake Shop is the farthest south bakery in the farthest south town of the farthest south Hawaiian island. It’s only a 15 minute drive from the bakery, through rolling green pastureland and along windswept rocky coastline, to the southern tip of Big Island – locally known as “South Point”. Much more significantly, South Point is also the southernmost point in the United States, beating out a place like Miami, Florida by a whopping 500 miles.

The bakery has other claims to fame, too: on a typical year, it welcomes more than 200,000 visitors from all across the globe and indulges them in some of the best baked goods found anywhere in the islands. On a sunny morning during tourism’s high season, part of this group can be found lounging in the shade of the compound’s two well-kept gazebos, which are filled with tables and chairs and accessible by a looping pathway of red-colored concrete. Others are seated in the covered porch out back of the bakery, with its bright white lattice and landscaped garden of sweet smelling, neon-hued tropical flowers.

It claims to be the most-visited bakery in the entire state, which is an astonishing fact if true considering how isolated it is: the surrounding town of Na’alehu has one gas station, one school, one park, one hardware store, and a small handful of restaurants and coffee shops. If not for the prominent sign mounted on its green-painted post beside the highway advertising the bake shop and visitor center, most drivers would likely breeze by without a second thought in the 3-minute-drive it takes to go from one end of town to the other.

Baked goods have become an indispensable fixture of the town, and many visitors to Big Island know Na’alehu simply as “that southern town with the amazing bakery”. It has become a crucial pit stop along the rural, coastal road from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to the towns of Captain Cook and Kona on the island’s western side, and seems to get busiest in the late morning when visitors coming from either direction stop for snacks, drinks and a bathroom break.

Its astounding popularity is clear even early in the morning: the bake shop opens its doors at 8:30am daily, but a line of people has often already formed by 8am. This is a clear sign that Punalu’u Bake Shop’s pastries are as good as people say – a crowd is willing to wait for half an hour just to get a box of the cream-filled, frosting-topped and sugar-coated goodies.

A Little Taste Of History

Portuguese explorers were some of the first Europeans to have sustained contact with native Hawaiians, and many of their cultural exports can still be seen in the islands today, from ukuleles to Portuguese sausage musubis to malasadas, a type of doughnut. Another Portuguese foodstuff brought to Hawaii – pao doce, or “sweet bread” in English – has become a quintessential modern Hawaiian dish, and can be found all over the islands from barbecues to restaurants to potlucks, even served on airplanes. The sweet bread is made with eggs, milk, sugar, yeast, flour and often lemon peel, and has a subtly sweet flavor and light, spongey texture. Arguably the most famous producer of Hawaiian sweet bread is Punalu’u Bake Shop, whose colorful, hibiscus flower-adorned labels can be found on bags of rolls, loafs and buns in virtually every supermarket on multiple islands.

For the freshest and most delectable sweet rolls, go straight to the source, though; bags of fresh-baked rolls are piled high on display shelves found within the bakery. They come in an impressive array of flavors, from guava to macadamia nut, apple cinnamon to taro. The original variety goes great with many of the dishes being served up in the restaurant, including classic Hawaiian comfort food like kailua pork and cabbage plate lunch. There’s also pre-made sandwiches and cold entrees found in a refrigerated display case, including vegetarian options like garden salads and fruit cocktails made with Big Island’s cornucopia of tropical fruits like pineapple, papaya, banana and mango.

Then there’s a chest of ice cream-by-the-scoop, with flavors like blueberry cheesecake, strawberry, chocolate macadamia nut and sweet potato, next to which is an elaborate display of locally grown Ka’u coffee in its many different types of roast, stacked in neat rows of airlocked bags. Pots of freshly brewed coffee line the wall, imparting the bake shop’s already overpowering sweetbread aroma with the pungent, alluring scent of roasted beans likely grown just a few miles down the road.

A floor-to-ceiling shelf of the shop’s offering of cookies lies adjacent to the ice-cream station, with cartons of macadamia nut shortbreads and oatmeal raisin cookies, as well as prepackaged pineapple fruit cake and Ka’u coffee cake. The shortbreads come in flavors like guava, passionfruit, ginger, coffee, coconut and more. These make fantastic snacks for hiking trips and beach days, and the sheer variety guarantees the bake shop has something for every different kind of sweet tooth.

Outside the shop in the courtyard, beneath a beautifully painted mural of a traditional Hawaiian luau, a local man wearing a flower-print shirt strums a guitar and fills the space with smooth jazz notes and sweetly sung island songs. Birds in the trees above add their own touches to the music, and clatter of empty baking trays being stacked comes from inside the shop. Some visitors weave in and out of the courtyard, sipping cups of coffee and browsing through the gift shop – which takes up about a third of the bakery – selling the usual trove of Hawaii trinkets and souvenirs.

How To Get There:

Punalu’u Bake Shop (pronounced “pooh-nah-loo-oo”) is located off of Highway 11, also known as Hawaii Belt Road or Mamalahoa Highway, in the small southern town of Na’alehu (naw-ah-lay-hoo). Visitors to the bake shop coming from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park will pass Punalu’u Black Sand Beach and Whittington Beach Park on the left-hand side of the road. A few miles past the beach park is the outskirts of Na’alehu, with a 76 gas station and the large open fields of Na’alehu Park on the left-hand side of the road. The large blue and white sign for the bake shop will be on the right side of the road immediately after the park.

Those coming from the Kona and Captain Cook areas will pass through the town of Ocean View, and continue for roughly 20 miles, passing the turn for South Point Road and Green Sands Beach on the right. Just after the tiny town of Waiohinu, a restaurant will appear on the right side of the road: South Side Shaka Restaurant and Bar. The left turn for Kaalaiki Road and the bake shop parking lot is just after this restaurant and the post office next door.

The bakery is open daily from 8:30am to 5pm daily, and only closes for Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. There are clean, modern bathrooms and several brochure racks with information about nearby attractions ranging from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to Punalu’u Black Sand Beach to local coffee and macadamia nut farm tours.

There’s the dry, rugged Kona side with endless black swaths of lavafield and thorny, parched shrubs, along with pastureland of golden grass (and many spectacular beaches, too). And then there’s the Hilo side, eternally green and lush with rushing rivers, towering trees and patches of jungle so thick they’re impassable. These are the two main climate zones on the island, caused by a staggering imbalance of rainfall made possible by its two exceptionally tall mountains.

In terms of agriculture, this makes East Hawaii Island a farmer’s dream: a year-round hot humid climate with plenty of sunshine and dependable, intermittent rainfall. And so much of the produce from the countless farms and gardens strewn across the island’s “wet” side passes through the town of Hilo – Hawai’i Island’s largest city and the second largest in the state. 

This means that Hilo Farmers’ Market on the corner of Kamehameha Avenue and Mamo Street in downtown and open everyday is hands-down the best place on the island to sample all the tropical bounty Hawai’i has to offer, all fresh off the produce truck from its countless scattered, rural farms. The market is located in a newly built open-air shelter found along Hilo’s legendary, picturesque bayfront, which features a string of windswept, colorful shops selling everything from homemade candy to ukuleles to volcano art to health food. The market complex basically marks the beginning of the commercial district, which goes on for a handful of blocks where it finally ends at the Wailuku River.

This makes Hilo Farmers’ Market a sort of waypoint into downtown for many visitors, who start their exploration of the iconic boulevard while sipping on a freshly chopped coconut or munching on a bag full of lychee fruit. The quality and variety of the fresh produce stacked up to impossible heights on the rows of plastic folding tables within the shelter is without equal on the island, leading many longtime locals to consider it the best farmers’ market. It’s here that mainlanders can be spotted bug-eyed and euphoric at tasting flavors that they never knew existed; fruits like soursop, mangosteen, rambutan, durian, rollinia, jackfruit and the many different types of sapote.

It’s here that so many visitors experience what locals call the “fruit tour”. Many consider it an indispensable part of coming to East Hawaii Island, which perhaps almost makes up for its supreme lack of beaches compared to the Kona side. Sampling different strange new exotic fruits and trying to describe their flavor is the order of the day: the jackfruit tastes like Juicyfruit Gum, the soursop tastes like Starbursts, the durian tastes like creamy onions. 

The tables are worked primarily by local women of different ethnicities, who are often yelling across the noisy market to one another in several different languages at once. They operate as cash-only unless otherwise posted, and usually speak good enough English to answer basic questions about the strange fruits piled on the tables. Their prices are usually reasonable, and are often cheaper than buying the same fruit from the same orchard in one of Hilo’s supermarkets.

Water Coconuts, Staple Crops, Flowers and Strange Fruit

At one end of the market is the solitary coconut vendor, who will let customers pick out their ideal nut and watch it get sliced open before their eyes – just another iconic Hawaiian sight in a town with many others to see. A burly woman confidently swings a machete, slicing away the coconut’s outer husk as the sound of the tool striking against the table adds to the market din. She cracks the inner chamber of sweet, refreshing water with an audible pop, and drops in a straw before handing it to her smiling customer who’s been filming the whole process.

A few tables down are the flower-sellers; women carefully working beneath rainbow-print parasols preparing fresh cut flowers and arranging bouquets. Market-goers’ eyes are immediately drawn to the waxy, blood-red Anthurium flowers interspersed in their elegant arrangements, complimented by various colors of ornamental ginger and even clumps of roses in the back.

Then there are vendors hawking bags of local staple crops, too, like the ubiquitous purple sweet potato and soft, sticky, sweet-smelling orbs of breadfruit. There’s even several tables offering the giant, woody roots of the taro plant – more accurately called “corms”, which seem hardly edible at first. This is the crop which ancient Hawaiians used to make their local staple dish, “poi”. Poi is a lightly fermented paste of pulverized taro root, often paired with a protein source like fish or pork, which is still eaten today in earnest all over the State. Taro is known as a “canoe plant”, referring to the small collection of crucial plants that the original Polynesian settlers brought with them in their outrigger sailing canoes to Hawaii to start their new civilization.

Offering crops like taro makes Hilo Farmers’ Market a great resource for visitors wanting to try a bit of Polynesian cooking during their stay on the island, whether it’s attempting a traditional batch of poi or making something more relatable like breadfruit french fries or coconut yogurt. The vendors in Hilo are friendly and patient, and many are plugged into the East Hawaii agriculture scene, creating an opportunity to ask real farmers questions about the exotic crops they grow – everything from macadamia nuts to cacao to coffee to vanilla.

Other tables are full of more familiar goodies, but in a variety that can make a mainlander’s head spin. Avocados the size of softballs, the many shapes and colors of mangoes, “apple” and “ice-cream” bananas, “white” pineapples and “strawberry” papayas. For foreigners who’ve become used to only finding one variety of banana or pineapple at the supermarket for their entire life, the realization that countless different varieties exist, all with their own distinct, subtle flavors and textures is a truly eye-opening experience.

Lastly, there are many types of fruit in the market that visitors have heard about – or even tasted – but have never seen up close, like dragonfruit, eggfruit, rambutan, passionfruit, sugarcane or pomelo. Although we all know what sugar tastes like, few visitors have ever seen a mound of fat, succulent sections of sugarcane for sale next to oranges, lemons and grapefruit. But to those adventurous enough to try something truly exotic, it’s worth it to buy the sugarcane stalk, break off a piece and happily suck on the sweet, earthy nectar throughout the day.

In the case of sugarcane and so many other exotic Hawaiian delights, doing a little research beforehand about what crops like these look like – and being unafraid to ask questions – will go a long way in making sense of the cornucopia being sold on the street in Hilo.

How To Get There:

Head along Highway 11, otherwise known as Hawaii Belt Road, until it intersects with Kamehameha Avenue just south of Banyan Drive. Turn left onto Kamehameha Avenue and follow it for 1.5-miles passing Hilo Bayfront Beach Park and the Russell Carroll Bayfront Soccer Fields on either side of the highway. After passing two gas stations, the Mooheau Bus Station Terminal with its adjacent massive Banyan Tree will come into view on the right side of the avenue. Less than a block up the road on the left, Hilo Farmers’ Market can be spotted in a large, slanted-roof open-air structure with an immense colorful mural painted on the side of its neighboring building.

There is no marked parking lot for the market, so it’s best to park on a side street (no meters in the area) or, for the sake of convenience, to use the sprawling bus station parking lot right across the avenue. Visitors to Hilo usually plan a day around a market stop and its ensuing“fruit tour” in the morning, and take their tropical bounties to nearby sightseeing spots like Coconut Island, Kamehameha The Great Statue, Liliuokalani Gardens or Bayfront Beach Park. A wonderful aspect of Hilo is that all of these destinations are within walking/biking distance of the farmers’ market along a breezy, palm-lined bayfront thoroughfare.

Weekends tend to be busiest at the market, with Saturday afternoon particularly crowded when it’s not uncommon to see the complex packed from wall to wall. But weekday mornings are much more laid back and relaxed, with most vendors arriving before dawn and unveiling their tables of immaculately stacked produce. By around 4pm the sellers are already breaking down, although a few seem to deliberately stay open in order to catch the late-day shoppers.

This is where the Kalapana Awa Band – a fixture of the Big Island music scene for years – plays every Wednesday evening as the venue’s house band, blasting out everything from old-time country hits to local Hawaiian-infused reggae to rock ‘n’ roll to rumba. Awa, otherwise known as “kava”, is a traditional Polynesian drink made from the root of a plant in the pepper family, consumed for its mildly sedative and relaxing effects. True to its name, Uncle Robert’s features an “Awa Bar” where locals and visitors alike drink the bitter elixir, usually out of coconut shell halves.

Onstage, members of the band sit in a row on a long, sturdily built wooden bench plucking guitars, basses, ukuleles and more, while patrons in brightly colored shirts and flower leis strung around their necks boogie down on the dance floor below. These Wednesday night parties usually start off pretty subdued, but as the hours creep by after the sun goes down and the crowd gets livelier, the band starts to kick their act into high gear and the place gets loud.

A drummer in the back bangs away on a dusty-looking drum set, rarely illuminated by the spotlights aimed at the line of players on the bench sitting like birds on a wire. There are occasional guest musicians, too: horn players, hand drummers and slack key guitarists. Every week is a little different, yet most of the Awa Band’s setlist is just a rearrangement of what they played the week before. 

For visitors with enough time on the island to make it to multiple Wednesdays down in Kaimu, they will begin to notice some of the band’s essentials: at some point in the night the boys onstage will invariably kick off renditions of “Hawaiian Superman,” “Mustang Sally” and “Twist and Shout” and other well-known hits. The crowd – many of them regulars – will give a familiar cheer and some of those seated at the picnic benches surrounding the dance floor and nursing bottles of beer will spring to their feet and start dancing. 

Other songs are much less well-known and not so rocking. When the band starts one of their traditional Hawaiian songs the swirling scrum of people below the stage mellows out, and many stand there transfixed at the sight of a veteran ukulele player making the instrument sing for all its worth, while the guitar and bass takes a backseat. For visitors, it’s a powerful sight: ethnic Hawaiians singing Hawaiian music in the Hawaiian language while in Hawai’i. This is arguably one of the biggest draws of Uncle Robert’s – such a combination is hard to find these days in the islands, and as every generation goes by it gets rarer.

For the Kalapana Awa Band, The Show Must Go On

The band is comprised of members of the Keli’iho’omalu family and their close friends, which has strong ancestral ties to Kalapana and Kaimu. The name of the venue and the Wednesday evening events themselves are simply known as “Uncle Roberts”, named so to honor the memory of the patriarch of old Kalapana Village, Robert Keli’iho’omalu. It is Robert’s children who now run the day-to-day operations of the sprawling complex, which includes a local-style kitchen serving up Hawaiian comfort food and some mainland staples, a humble grocery store called “Kaimu Korner” and even a smoothie shack making cool, refreshing drinks out of locally grown produce like mangoes, pineapples, passionfruit, bananas, papayas and so much more. 

Before 2020, the Wednesday night concerts also included a massive open-air market with a veritable maze of vendor tables selling everything from soap to handmade jewelery to tacos to spring rolls to health tonics to photography to t-shirts. On a clear evening during tourism’s high season the market would be absolutely packed wall-to-wall with patrons, while the hissing roar of frozen food being thrown into giant woks full of hot cooking oil sitting on propane grills filled the air from every direction. This was Uncle Robert’s in its heyday, and unfortunately the family had to make some drastic changes to the venue’s format due to Coronavirus, including scrapping the market component because – as anyone who’d shopped at the market back then could attest – even the tiniest effort at social distancing was impossible.

Back in those days there wasn’t a cover charge to see the band, but since the pandemic Uncle Robert’s has had to charge a small admission price on Wednesdays. This is to make up for all the lost vendor fees after the night market was dropped. The change may have driven away a few locals, but plenty of visitors still come to Kaimu to see the show because they know it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and they feel good in supporting local music and a community that’s seen more than its fair share of disasters over the years.

Today, Wednesday nights in Kaimu are usually just scaled-down versions of what they were in the old days, with a long, snaking line of cars parked along the road’s narrow shoulder leading to the venue and raucous, guitar-heavy music echoing out across the old lavafield. The awa bar and regular bar largely look the same, and the band’s energy and musicianship is as bold as it was back in the old days. There is one notable new addition to the setting, though: a massive 6-foot-diameter puzzle piece tile mural depicting the Kingdom of Hawai’i’s Royal Crest stands at the entrance to the venue. Kalapana is home to many Hawaiian sovereignty activists, including Robert’s son Samuel (known in the village as “Uncle Sam”) who commissioned the piece from local artist and master ceramicist Rika Blue. It took Rika years of tinkering in her studio to complete the mural, which is made up of almost 100 separate hand-painted pieces. Though the piece is hard to miss, visitors sometimes walk by it without realizing its significance to the Kaimu community, and it’s worth it to study the mural up close and appreciate its awe-inspiring attention to detail.

How To Get There

Uncle Robert’s is accessible via Highway 130 coming from the town of Pahoa, which is roughly 20 miles south of Hilo in Big Island’s Puna District. Follow the highway for roughly 10 miles past Pahoa until signs appear warning that the road is ending. There will be a left turn lane, and taking that left will bring visitors to a “T” in the road after a few hundred more feet. From this intersection, at around 6pm or 7pm on Wednesday nights during busy season, there will already be a long stretch of cars parked along the shoulder, usually up to and past the intersection itself. This is basically the “free” parking for Uncle Robert’s, whereas by turning right and driving down to the market complex proper visitors can find pay-to-park spots out on the flat lavafield with a friendly local directing traffic and taking payments.

A smart way to experience a Wednesday in Kaimu is to come early, easily find free parking out on the road, and then set off on the easy quarter-mile hike to Kaimu Beach. Though locals call it a “beach”, it’s actually a scraggly stretch of coastline with crashing waves that throw the giant lava boulders to and fro as they break and recede. Swimming here is more or less unheard of. The footpath to the coast is paved with red cinder stones, and climbs over hills of cracked, ropey lava known in Hawaiian as “pahoehoe” and through young forests of coconut palms. For those who forgot to pick up beach snacks in Pahoa town, stop by Kaimu Korner for basic provisions, drinks and even a few homemade grab-and-go meals.

The trailhead for the beach path isn’t the easiest to find for newcomers – it can be found across the parking lot from the grocery store and up a stone staircase. The vast majority of the locals milling around Kaimu are friendly and patient, and most genuinely appreciate visitors and the business they bring to the struggling area. So ask around for more information, inquire about when the band is slated to start that night and sip a coconut shell full of kava just to say you did.

The restaurant and smoothie shack in the main complex are open during daylight hours on weekdays and Saturdays, and are usually closed Sunday. They sometimes stay open late on Wednesdays to serve the crowds arriving to see the concert, but this isn’t guaranteed. So, if you’re planning to stay for the evening, it’s a good idea to arrive early, order a chicken katsu or kailua pork plate and pineapple-mango smoothie, and then explore the area while there’s still daylight.