Sugar Cane – RDZ Photography

With Avery Island’s location in southern Louisiana the main agricultural business is sugar cane.

With the year round warm, wet weather it is the perfect climate for nature to grow. In the late 1800s the son of the founder of Tabasco sauce, Edward Avery McIlhenny, created the botanical gardens known as Jungle Gardens.

The gardens cover 170 acres of Avery Island.

There isn’t a large number of different plants, flowers and trees, but the gardens are well laid out, and immaculately kept up.

As with most of Louisiana, water is always nearby.

Including this nice pond, with a warning sign to not feed the alligators (which seems like anyone would know that).

We did NOT feed this alligator.

The turtles were safely out of harms way.

A few buildings remain from the early days of Tabasco pepper growing.

This drive is appropriately named Wisteria Lane, as you make your way under the Wisteria arch.

The highlight however is Bird City. In 1895 Edward raised eight egrets in captivity, releasing them in the fall for their migration. The next year they returned with more egrets.

Ever since then thousands of egrets return to Avery Island in the spring and reside there until late summer.

When we arrived for the Tabasco tour we were one of the few who opted to purchase combination tickets for the factory tour and the gardens. It was money well spent!

Day 18 of the Hawaii trip is a travel day, so we stayed fairly close to the airport for our late afternoon flight. We found a number of interesting artistic and historic sites to visit.

First up was the Sacred Gardens. This location seemed to be part gardens, part religious, part cosmic and more.

They did have a ‘Buddha Garden’, with some nice sculptures.

Their claim to fame though is their labyrinths.

Just down the road is the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center. Situated on the grounds of a former sugar plantation owner, there are a number of buildings for various uses including a tiny high school.

The grounds are immaculate.

Makai Glassworks is located in another former sugar plantation. We were able to observe the artist at work.

In the same area, but off the tourist path, is the Dingking surfboard shop.

A true find, they make custom surfboards.

In addition to the surfboards, they do other custom woodwork including this great canoe.

But their specialty is surfboards.

Our next stop was the Surfing Goat Dairy, and as our directions had us turn into the road we were amazed that a dairy would have such a fancy entrance – until we realized the entrance was for a neighborhood of multi million dollar houses, and the dairy was off to to the side.

But they did have goats, and surfboards.

While most of the employment in Maui now is tourism, they once had thriving businesses in agriculture, primarily the sugar plantations and pineapples. They even once had railroads to bring the goods to the port, as evidenced by this former railroad office.

In my 3 weeks in Hawaii I did not see 1 railroad track (although there are apparently a couple of historic railroads around).