Hamakua Springs is located in, well, Hamakua, and today I thought I’d tell you a little about the Hamakua Coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i.

Hamakua is one of the ancient districts of this island. It spreads just north of Hilo for about 50 miles up the coast to Waipi‘o Valley, which is a beautiful, deeply historical valley that was settled in the 13th century or earlier. Several powerful chiefs hailed from Waipi‘o.

The book Place Names of Hawai‘i, citing Nathaniel Bright Emerson’s Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, says “Hamakua” (poetic) means “kuhi loa.” “Long corner.” I’m assuming that refers to its physical location.

Here’s something to chew on: Almost no one pronounces “Hamakua” correctly. It’s properly pronounced HAA-MAA-KUA. There are kahakos—macrons, or stresses—on the first two As, meaning you hold them a little longer.

Few people even know that anymore. It’s as though we lived in Nevada and called it “Las Vee-gus” all the time.

Anyway. If you were to travel the Hamakua coast long ago, you would have walked along winding paths, up and down through gullies and streams. You’d have seen Hawaiian families living here and there, their grass homes tucked into the valleys and gulches, many of them growing kalo (taro).

In more recent years, the crop in Hamakua was sugar cane. The coast had sugar plantations and mills and the plantation villages that sprung up around them, and cane growing seemingly everywhere. And there was a railroad that ran where the main highway (19) is now, but which was destroyed in a 1946 tsunami and not rebuilt.

This island’s, and Hamakua’s, sugar chapter is over now, and now the story is about diversified agriculture. And that’s where Richard, and Hamakua Springs Country Farms, comes into the picture.

Rural Hamakua is a lovely, scenic place of much rainfall and therefore luxurious green rainforest. It is a coast of waterfalls, rivers, springs and streams, with prawns in them for the catching. Hamakua is also a place of swimming holes. Of sweet guavas that squish between your barefoot toes, or taste delicious if you get them before they fall. And waiawi, which are little strawberry guavas, both yellow ones and red ones. Right now the waiawi are abundant and fallen fruit is covering backroads like bright carpets.

On one side of the Hamakua coast are cliffs that reach down to the ocean, where you can watch whales pass by during their migrating season. Along the other side we see Mauna Kea, the volcano that stands magestically over us, and which is sometimes covered with an amazing cloak of snow in the winter.

There are probably other places as beautiful, but you’d have to do a lot of talking to convince me that there is a place MORE beautiful than Hamakua.