Last Day on Moloka’i

 Today was our last day on Moloka’i, so, we headed out to check on the things we had not seen.  Our first adventure was at the Moloka’i Museum and Sugar Mill.

Sugar cane was once one of the main ventures on the island, but it has not been practiced on a large scale since the 1930s. This is the single remaining mill on the island.  It was restored in the 1980s and shows each step in the cane sugar derivation process.

Starting with the horse drawn cane mill, used to extract sap from the sugar cane, I felt that I was looking at a giant version of my granddaddy’s sorghum molasses operation.  All of the early steps in the process were the same, they were just using sugar cane instead of sorghum cane.

Once inside the mill itself, the long cooker was exactly like granddaddy’s cooker, except that it was about four times as large.  The process, though, of gradually heating up the sap and cooking it down as it moved along the long cooker was the same.  I remembered all the times I helped as a child.

The difference came after the cooking process.

Since the goal of this process was not cane syrup but cane sugar, these two huge steam powered centrifuges were used.  They spun the sugar out of the syrup and what was left was their version of  “molasses.”  It was very interesting.

Afterwards we went to a Macadamia nut farm.  We learned all about the Macadamia trees, native to Australia, that constantly bloom and bear ten months of the year.

The nuts are not picked. They fall off the tree and are raked up every day.  Then the nuts are dried in the sun for several weeks until the shell hardens and they are ready to shell.

We got to do everything from picking to cracking to shelling then to eating!  It was all fun.

Tomorrow we leave Moloka’i and fly up to Kauai for our final week here.