We had a wonderful time with my brother and his wife, at their house in Kalua, Kauái. A beautiful place, but memories of the intense colonialism and resource extraction remain.
One oddly poignant item - there is a place called Spouting Horn. Waves coming into lava tubes shoot spray far up into the air. Very beautiful - but we were told that one of the holes shot water so high that it got into the sugar cane planted nearby, so a foreman took some dynamite down to the spout and blew it up - widening and blocking it.
Seemed Iike such a perfect metaphor, for so much of colonial history in Hawaii ;(
I had to find a link to confirm what we were told, and it is indeed a true story.
"The head of a sugar plantation in the area blasted that blowhole apart back in the 1920s, on account, its salt spray was damaging the crop. This bygone bigger brother to the Spouting Horn could apparently send up spray a couple of hundred feet high!"
https://hawaiianislands.com/kauai/things-to-do/spouting-horn/
