Who cares about Capri? That’s what I was thinking when we were planning our 3-week trip to Italy back in 2008. What I knew of it was that it was a Mediterranean hoity-toity haunt for the rich. Maseratis, casinos and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, right?

“Mariah Carey has a house there,” my wife added. Thanks … all the more reason to keep my distance. We had other priorities: Positano, Sorrento, Matera, Puglia, Rome, Umbria, Tuscany…it was already a long list.

So when we rolled into Sorrento at the start of the trip — at the end of what my wife and I will forever refer to as The Longest Day in Human History: an 8am departure from Denver, an overnight flight from Philly, a rental car debacle in Rome, a two-hour train ride to Naples, a transfer to Sorrento on the stop-every-50-feet Circumvesuviana, a two-mile hike uphill to the hotel — Capri was not on the agenda. It wasn’t even close to creeping onto the agenda.

And yet within an hour at the Hotel Minervetta in Sorrento, we were decompressed. The boats in the Bay of Naples bobbed like sleeping ducks. Mt. Vesuvius crowned the horizon, looking like it had been in a good mood for a few decades. Authentic Campagna-style pizza and red wine filled our bellies. This corner of Italy was pretty damn special. Maybe we should see as much of it as we could.

A few days later, we left Positano and the Amalfi Coast so that we could take the afternoon ferry ride to the mystical island that gave us caprese salad and short pants. We had three hours — not much time — but upon pulling into the harbor, we knew this excursion would be worth it. Chalky cliffs rose in all directions, and a pastel village with a humble expression on its face hugged a low, green saddle that separated the island’s two peaks.

We beat feet to the depot and took the second hair-raising bus ride of the day: the precipitous journey from Capri to Anacapri, a landlocked town located high on the island’s rocky shoulder. The bus was standing room only, filled with — surprisingly — a lot of locals. Below us lay a sea whose color can only be described as cerulean. Between us? Air and vertical rock. Not much else.

Anacapri was pleasantly sleepy and clearly removed from the outside world. It’s town alleys ensconced us in white wash, and our feet tripped here and there on uneven pavers. With the exception of the school kids who skipped and sprinted around the piazza, the town was largely silent. We giggled at yet another Amalfi Coast restaurant named “Il Saraceno,” had ourselves some gelato, took fashionable pics of each other leaning stylistically against white walls (ahh, the days before kids), and then boarded the Dare Devil Bus to catch our ferry.

We missed a lot on Capri: the Blue Grotto, the Faraglioni sea stacks, P. Diddy and his yacht… But that was perfectly fine with me. For an island that has such a larger-than-life reputation, it’s quite small, and yet we still found a corner where local life felt like … well, local life as you see it elsewhere around Italy. For a blitzkrieg three-hours of observation, we got a pretty good sense for the place.

What prompted this post? Steve Jobs.

“Oh c’mon!” you must be saying. “If I read another tribute to that guy, I’m gonna——”

I should say that one of Jobs’ most unsuccessful products, one of his “biggest failures” — Apple TV — is prompting this post. We bought one of these devices back in July so that we could run slideshows of our travel photography on our TV. For under $100, its been worth it, and so I’m going back through the archives, and retouching photo sets for the upstairs boob tube.

Is this blog timely? No, not always. So what. The whole reason to take pictures is to capture a story so that you can retell it forever.

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OK. So it’s been three months since we went to Switzerland, but I’m not done posting images. I’m just catastrophically slow at updating my blog now that I have my own business (by the way, check out our killer website, designed by HeyDay Creative).

On top of that, our little family has decided to move to a bigger house. Where this house will be, we don’t know yet, but getting our current place ready has been pretty consuming. The plus? Eventually, there will be new wall space in a new home to decorate with enlargements of Switzerland.

Switzerland still sneaks up on me and blows me away with what we saw. Will I ever see a landscape more beautiful than the Berner Oberland? Will I ever experience a better network of trains? Will I ever attempt to eat a three-foot-long coiled sausage bathed in brown onion sauce?

The answers are: No. No. And hell no.

For the last three major trips we’ve gone on — Mexico, Kauai and Switzerland — we’ve rented a couple of lenses from BorrowedLenses.com. Each time, we’ve made sure to rent a tilt-shift lens.

Now I have never pretended to be the most technically aware photographer. I couldn’t begin to accurately tell you how the optics inside these lenses work. All I know is that a tilt-shift warps the field of focus so that you can manipulate the scene in all sorts of wacky ways. With a normal lens, the field of focus is always parallel to the front of the lens. With a tilt-shift, you pivot that plane in all sorts of weird angles.

There, that’s the best I can do to explain it. Wikipedia is more eloquent.

On Lake Lucerne, we took a day-long boat tour, and that’s where the Canon 45mm TS-E really came most in handy. As paddle-wheelers and charming villages passed by, I set the aperture to a narrower depth, pivoted the lens down (or sometimes on a diagonal) and fired away.

While tilt-shifts can often miniaturize a scene, I find that they can actually show a place in a way that is more true to how the eye sees it and how memory imprints it. Take for instance, the image above. In my memory, the hills, the water, the trees — they are all splashes of color, nothing more. But the structures, the boats and mostly, the feeling — that’s what resonated and stuck with me most. A tilt-shift can capture just those memory burners. They’re fun images to share: “this is how it looked, but this is how I remember it.”

The same goes for this image of Wengen. No other shot I took of this town showed just how nestled in the valley it really was. A standard 45mm wouldn’t have done it as well.

To that, I say “yay, tilt-shifts.”

It took nearly an hour to discover what was happening.

We had hiked up to this meadow just outside Zermatt, on the trail that eventually leads to Zmutt and the North Face of the Matterhorn. It was getting hot, and Varenna was inspecting the gravel on the trail, handing her best specimens to Mom, and then pushing her stroller like the big girl she was proclaiming to be (“bick guhr! bick gurh!). We were all content, and not planning to go too far. After all, this appeared to be it: the iconic view of the Matterhorn, the one that conjures visions of alpenhorns and men yodeling “Ri-co-la” into the crisp glacial air.

But as we turned to head back to town, the moon was suddenly quite noticeable and on a very interesting course.

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And so, over the course of maybe 20 minutes, it swooped low, landed on the summit of the Matterhorn, and temporarily turned the world’s most famous mountain into a Santa hat.

It disappeared, then reemerged, like an arrow piercing the heart of Switzerland and coming out the other side. It was our second-to-last full day in the country, but it felt like an apt conclusion to the trip.

Here’s my dilemma: I have too many good photos from the Berner Oberland for one post.

This has little to do with me and my photography skills. It has everything to do with the extreme beauty of the area. Never before have I been anywhere as dramatic and scenic as this alpine region smack in the middle of Switzerland. We spent almost an entire week here, and it still wasn’t enough. Every day was different, and we kept moving, but even then, I can’t pretend that I am a fountain of definitive photography knowledge on the area.

But what I did learn, I’m putting here, so hopefully there are a few kernels of insight.

In full disclosure, I ran out of time (and money) in the valley to shoot the following areas: Interlaken, Brienzsee, Thunersee, Jungfraujoch, Shilthorn/Piz Gloria, Schynige Platte, Gimmelwald, Grindelwald, First/Bachalpsee and — tops on my Unfinished Business List — Hinteres Lauterbrunnental.

That’s a ton. In fact, if you are reading this because you are researching a vacation in the area, it may sound like I didn’t see any of the big sights. Not true. There’s just simply that much to see and shoot in the Berner Oberland.

This post covers the following subjects:

• The Lauterbrunnen Valley
• The Jungfrau
• The Jungfraubahn

Part 2 will cover:

• The Eiger
• The Mönch
• Staubbach Falls
• Mürren
• Swiss life
• Cows, cows, and more cows.

I’ve included a Google Map of these places — and where I took these images — at the bottom of this post.

Photographing the Lauterbrunnen Valley…
The only way I can describe this area is to compare it to two places I’ve never been (how stupid is that?) — imagine Yosemite Valley with the Himalaya plopped on top of it. Hyperbole? Not really. The town of Lauterbrunnen, at the bottom of the valley, sits at an elevation of 2,608 feet. In addition to having the 1,000-foot-tall Staubbach Falls dumping huge volumes of water on its head, the town is overwhelmed by the 13,642-foot Jungfrau, which soars over the valley just 4.5 miles away. Basically, in the distance between Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Jungfrau rises 11,000 feet higher than Lauterbrunnen, the equivalent of nine Empire State Buildings.

Capturing the beautiful colors and textures of the Lauterbrunnen Valley is easy — capturing its massive scale is extraordinarily tough.

There are three ways to approach this potato — (a) from the valley floor, (b) from just above Lauterbrunnen, and (c) from the top looking down.

I’ve always felt the latter fails to do a place justice photographically speaking, but if you have to get that all-incompassing wide-angle shot from the top, the terminus of the Männlichen lift above Wengen is the place to go (see photo at the top of this post — that’s the view from the Männlichen looking over the Lauberhorn to the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, rather than down into the valley).

A far better option to capture the scale of the Lauterbrunnen Valley is along the cog-railway route from Lauterbrunnen to the town of Wengen. The first view opens up shortly after leaving the Lauterbrunnen train station. The railroad bends uphill, crosses the Weiss Lütschine River and reveals a magnificent view of Staubbach Falls, the town’s chapel, the valley cliffs and the snow-draped Alps in the distance (first photo in this section).

The other priceless view of the valley opens up just before the train reaches Wengen. Make sure you are seated on the right side of the train just after the Wengwald train stop. The view (above) lasts for only 20 seconds or so, but it encompasses the falls, the massive cliffs, the summits of the Breithorn and Jungfrau, and a magnificent foreground of Swiss chalets and emerald pasture. Since you are shooting from a moving train, be sure to have a faster shutter speed. I even went so far to shoot on a motordrive to increase the chances I’d have the right cropping when all was said and done.

Photographing the Jungfrau…
I will admit that I missed a key component to the “Jungfrau’s experience” — at more than 100 CHF roundtrip, we opted to skip the Jungfraujoch, the high-altitude train station situated on the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Mönch that is marketed as “The Top of Europe.” It was sacrificed at the altar of 6 CHF bottled water and all the other gouge-jobs speckled across this beautiful country. We’d just had enough of doling out the cash, and ultimately figured we had plenty to enjoy underneath the Jungfrau.

Frankly, I have never seen a mountain more domineering than the Jungfrau. It’s sheer volume, scale and steepness brought an instant dose of humility. Ultimately, I found dozens of great vantage points to shoot this peak, even during early morning strolls outside our hotel in Wengen, where I snapped this shot. Ultimately, the best place to capture the rugged and imposing soul of the Jungfrau is right underneath it, where trails bisect lush meadows (above image), quaint little trains chug by on the Jungfraubahn and Wengenalpbahn, and traditional Swiss huts are overwhelmed by the mountain’s scale. We took the train to the Eiger Glacier station and hiked down to Kleine Scheidegg and Wengenalp. With our daughter it took the better part of a day, but at every turn, a new face to the Jungfrau was revealed.

The other “must” for shooting the Jungfrau is from the Mürren side of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, particularly in the town of Mürren itself, where you face the narrowing chasm of the Lauterbrunnen Valley and the sheer western wall of the Jungfrau. The quaint little choo-choo ride from Grütschalp to Mürren is also great for the precision art form of hanging-out-the-window photography. (Or, you can walk the trails in the area, too, and get the same killer views with better foregrounds … we had a baby on board).

Photographing the Jungfraubahn…

At certain points on the trip, I found myself wondering if certain attractions are more about the Swiss engineering than the natural features of the land. Few tourist draws demonstrate this better than the Jungfraubahn, which burrows into the face of the Eiger, hangs a sharp right, burrows through the guts of the Mönch and pops out at the Jungfraujoch, a snow-and-ice clad saddle at 11,332 feet. There, a whole tourism infrastructure of amusements has been erected, including an observatory atop a rock outcrop called The Sphinx.

The Jungfraujoch is the tallest railway station in Europe, which begs the question: there’s a railway station higher than this? (Yes. The Tanggula Railways Station in Tibet is a ridiculous 16,627 feet high). More incredibly, the tunnel and railway were built between 1896 and 1912. I think lightbulbs were also a rather novel new invention at that time.

Well, Swiss engineering aside, the Jungfraubahn is really a beautiful train to look at, and its bright red trolley cars chugging underneath the burly mountains is really one of the most romantic — and iconic — images of Europe. All along the hiking path between the Eiger Glacier train station and Kleine Scheidegg, there are great views of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger with train tracks running in the foreground, and since the train goes by roughly every 10 minutes, its photographically like shooting fish in a barrel. What makes it such a striking image is the bright red of the train cars contrasted with the various shades of green and blue in the landscape. You get bonus points if you can somehow capture the wildflowers, too, but I was unsuccessful.

The train + landscape shot is easy pickings. But getting the story behind the train, and the sheer madness of its existence, is another matter. I managed to photograph the fleeting moment of a tourist smiling out the window of the train as it chugged out of the Eiger Glacier station with a tilt-shift (above left). Pure luck, but it was about the closest thing I got to capturing the excitement of the Jungfraubahn.

Part 2 will include more on the area, including the Eiger and cows.

(Click on images for a larger view)

Go ahead. Ogle all you want.

Words often fail me. They fail me the most when it comes to mountains. Grandeur. Majesty. Magnificence. Please: those words are chumps when you are beneath the Jungfrau (above two images), a hulking mountain that towers over the Lauterbrunnen Valley like a glacier clad bully. It’s name (roughly translated as Young Girl in German) is hardly worth dissecting. It makes little sense. This peak is a beast.

It’s neighboring two peaks — the Mönch and the Eiger — fit into a little folktale. The Young Girl protected by the Monk from the frightening Ogre. How quaint. Our first full day in the area — in mid-June mind you — was spent underneath the Eiger’s legendary North Face watching mini-avalanches, snow plumes and chunks of ice fall off its sheer walls. The Eiger is less like Shrek, more like an assassin.

And then there is the Matterhorn, the world’s most recognizable mountain. On the approach to Zermatt via the train from Visp, not a seat is used by the passengers. They are all standing, dangling out the windows hoping for that first glimpse of its iconic, snowclad summit peaking over the shoulder of the hills.

So magnetic is the mountain’s pull, people travel across the world to its remote little corner of the Alps, drop $350 CHF a night at a Zermatt hotel, eat $40 CHF pizza, and simply stare at its broken-nose summit. Slipping under the radar are its equally grand neighbors, like the cut-glass peak of the Weisshorn (above left) or the hulking, glacier-clad eminence of Monte Rosa, the tallest peak in Switzerland. “Meh,” the tourists seem to say with the direction of their turned heads. “Just look at the Matterhorn!”

I’m an English major from The Colorado College, and I remember one particularly frustrating lecture that was devoted entirely to “the gaze.” The implications of a character gazing at another. What does it mean to gaze? To pine? To possess with the eyes? Yawn. Maybe it was because we were reading Wordsworth’s poetry, but I thought it was a rather dumb topic.

But if the lecture was on mountains, then I would have gotten it.

Yes, sitting by a lake and staring at a towering, rippled, snow-covered peak is a noteworthy action. You are possessing something with your eyes. The strength, the unflappability of a mountain that has stood there for eons. An undaunted thing that rules over its subjects. An unmoved mover.

What man doesn’t have some stupid, innate, overinflated sense of self worth that he wants to possess the character of a hulking mountain? I don’t know one.

Lucerne is said to be one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. I still have a lot of Europe to cover, but its hard to imagine a cleaner, more idyllic, more photogenic city than Lucerne. The place seems designed for postcards, coffeetable books and small 1-inch-by-1-inch decorative chocolate wrappers.

To get my best shots in Lucerne, I made my way to these places:

Capturing Blue Hour

There is a certain moment at dusk when an urban landscape looks its best. The grit fades into the shadows, the sky holds an ethereal cobalt, and the light of the buildings and streetlamps twinkle to life. It doesn’t last long, and in Lucerne I only had one true crack at it: the last night we were there. The previous two evenings I was too exhausted and jetlagged, and because the sun sets so late in Switzerland in June, I ducked in early before blue hour happened.

Fortunately, in the limited window I had, I lucked out and found one of the best vantage points in Lucerne. In the Google Map, I’ve labeled this image Jesuit Church at Blue Hour, and it was taken along the northern shore of the Reuss River.

Elements of Lucerne remind me of Venice — the stately bridges crossing placid water, the waterside restaurants with tourist menus in four languages, loads of drunks shouting into the wee hours (just add a thick cloud of rotting fish to the air and it might complete the vibe). This location, I feel, showed Lucerne at its romantic best.

Here’s another angle I played with while I had a quasi-blue hour. Like much of Europe in summer, dusk seems to last forever. It wasn’t really dark until 10pm or so, and since we were traveling with a 1-year-old, it was hard for all three of us to stay up that late. Still, from about 8:45pm to 9:45pm, there is a dwindled light that is fun to work with. From the Lake Bridge, you have this beautiful angle of both the Chapel Bridge and the Jesuit Church, with white swans in motion.

Working With Perspective

The crown jewel of Lucerne is the wooden Chapel Bridge, or Kapellbrücke, which spans the River Reuss on a diagonal. Dating back to 1333, it is historically important on two accounts: It is the oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe and the world’s oldest surviving truss bridge. It’s long corridor is decorated with paintings depicting the city’s history, though, tragically, many of these were lost in the 1993 fire that devastated much of the bridge (a boat moored to the bridge caught fire and it quickly spread).

Draped with colorful pansies and crowned by a stately brick tower, the Chapel Bridge’s exterior captures all the postcard attention. But I found the interior of the bridge provides more opportunities for creative photography. The bridge’s natural linear perspective, its artistic details, and the opportunity to incorporate the cityscape into the shot, all pose unique challenges.

The locations for the above and below photos are listed on the Google Map as Interior Chapel Bridge Shots and Interior Blue Hour Chapel Bridge, respectively.

The Postcard Shot

On the one sunny day we had in Lucerne, I rose early and so did my daughter, and the two of us cruised around the quiet city for a good 90 minutes. She’s only 1-year-old, and usually patient with me and my happy snapping. The biggest thing in Lucerne that really got her excited were the swans, and this location below — labeled Chapel Bridge and Mt. Pilatus — not only kept her happy and smiling, but it produced one of my favorite shots of the trip. I will post some tilt-shift images from here in a later post.

Beauty in the Details

Later on our trip, we went to Zermatt, where it is easy to get lulled into the habit of placing the Matterhorn in the background of every shot. The Chapel Bridge in Lucerne has a similar effect. It’s kind of like that guy at a wedding who seems to poke his head into every person’s photo and mug for the camera. Truthfully, I’m not sure I got enough variety to my Lucerne shots, but one subject that would have been fun to play with more are the town’s murals.

Colorful, vivid and lively, these painted walls decorate a few of the buildings (mostly restaurants) in the old town quarter of Lucerne. This one (above right, labeled Old Town Murals on the map) seemed to depict the harvest season, hell, and all the reasons why I hate clowns.

And this one (Zunfthaus zu Pfistern) suckered me in because I had never seen a golden pretzel before.

Finally, this fairy-tale like mural lies just across from the Harvest/Hell/Clown Show building. My one struggle in all of this was finding a unique way to frame these paintings. It just felt all too easy to crane my neck up and take a picture like a tourist. Oh well.

And because it’s like that dude at weddings who sneaks into every shot, here’s the Chapel Bridge one more time, from a vantage point labeled Quintessential Chapel Bridge.

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I recently spent two weeks touring around Switzerland with my wife and our one-year-old daughter. It was a magnificent trip — one of those get-it-out-of-my-system-now kinds of trips while Varenna is young and portable. Ha! That’s at least what we thought when we booked the trip in January. She’s a bit more … mobile, shall we say.

But we had a very good time, and ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised with the images I returned home with. In the moment, we both were a bit distracted trying to keep our daughter entertained, engaged, and safe. We worked hard every hour of the trip, just not on photography. Or so it seemed.

Switzerland is a lavishly colorful place. Blessed with ample rain, fertile soil and some of the most chiseled mountains on this planet, it’s hard to take bad images. And if you are the type who comes home with 2,900 images on an external hard drive that need sorting, correcting and categorizing (I am raising my hand as I type this), an unfortunate thing starts to happen. You become numb to emerald green, cobalt blue and buttercup yellow.

Since Tanager Photography started in 2007, I’ve maintained that I am a color photographer. Tanagers are colorful birds, and they travel great distances. But I found myself appreciating a new aesthetic with my Swiss images, and it surprised me — desaturation. It’s nothing revolutionary, and believe me, I’m not acting like I just invented the iPad here. But as I edited my images and adjusted them, I couldn’t help but get excited seeing some of them transform as I moved the saturation slider to the left.

Our trip took us to four distinct places, each with their own photogenic qualities: Lucerne, with its wooden chapel bridge (above right and below); the Berner Oberland with its hulking glacier-clad peaks and lush pastures; Zermatt with the mighty Matterhorn (top); and Zürich, where scores of clock towers seem to suggest that the Swiss are punctual or something.

I’ll devote a later post to where and what to shoot in Lucerne, but its really all about that picturesque wooden bridge with its colorful flower trellises and multi-hued riverfront. I must have shot every conceivable angle on that bridge, but what rounded out the collection wasn’t a fresh angle so much as it was a treatment. By desaturating, the textures of the wood rose to the surface, making my collection of images on the bridge a lot more three dimensional.

The same thing occurred with my images from the Berner Oberland. Here you have the towering, snowy triumvirate of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger graced with these verdant green fields — truly one of the most spectacular scenes on earth — and yet, the temptation is to point a wide angle lens on it and turn the saturation up to 11 because that’s how it looks. In hindsight, one of my top pictures from the area was a simple shallow depth of field portrait of a pine-cone decoration hanging on the door of a house in Wengen (second from the top). Easiest shot in the world, and yet, when paired down and drained of its color, it just seemed to complete the other, wide-angle, saturated shots in my collection.

In Zermatt, where the landscape is drier and more harsh, adding a black-and-white treatment here and there seemed to give the land a new interpretation — that of a hostile moonscape covered in ice. I felt that the mountains surrounding Zermatt had been tamed by too much man-made activity (trams, trains, gondolas, cables, roads, girders, pipes, everywhere). Extracting that brutal harshness in the glacial landscape seemed like a nice counterpoint.

Ultimately, what gets me excited about travel photography is the whole collection from a place. Does it tell a story? In Switzerland, that story is buried in the textures of the land, the buildings and the people, and its not so easy to see at first. It wasn’t until I was at home in Denver, working in Lightroom, that I started to see these images come together in a way that was exciting as a whole. It took draining the color from select scenes — an act that defied my style as an artist — to make sense of the Swiss story.

Coming up: mountain porn, waterfalls, tilt-shifting Switzerland and shooters guides to Lucern, Zürich, Zermatt and the Berner Oberland. The Tanager Blog will be a busy place for the next few weeks.

You should never start a blog post with an apology for not posting recently. It’s just bad form, and truthfully, who reads this blog regularly anyway? Even if you did, you’d notice that I haven’t posted anything — anything — since January.

But I feel the long absence is worth noting, if for no other reason than the major personal changes I’ve undergone since my last post.

I’ve started my own company.

Not a hobby company. Not a dabble-in-it-and-see-if-it-fits company.

A livelihood. A bona fide “wow, this is what I ought to be doing in life” company.

My business is called Headwaters Content, and its one of Denver’s first content strategy firms. What brought this about is a long and probably boring story (I think it’s interesting. You probably don’t). But needless to say, maintaining a photo blog has been a free-time activity, and since February, setting Headwaters up has been rather consuming, both from a labor-intensive and mentally fatiguing perspective.

So this weekend, Hailey and I set up the white seamless and took some head shots, as we were both in need of them for our company websites. And since our daughter is cuter than us both, and she couldn’t be left alone for more than 30 seconds, we brought her into the pictures.

So where does this leave Tanager Photography? I’m not sure. The passion is still very intense. I want to continue to take compelling images and share them with friends, family and an audience online. It’s just not a bill payer, so it can’t be my top free-time priority anymore because, well, free time doesn’t really exist the way it used to.

But we’ll be traveling soon, and I’ll be bringing my gear and obsessing over morning light conditions in no time. It won’t be another four months before I post new images. No way.

Well, here I am, two months after the trip, and I still have the international/sometimes kooky/always delicious flavors of Kauai on my taste buds. Here’s the best of what we had:

1. Puka Dog, Poipu – It’s the kind of food that inspires 1,001 Anthony Bourdain rants about post-hangover cures. A Polish sausage, a hole drilled through it, a tropical relish pumped through the open vein, and the whole thing slathered in garlic sauce and neatly fit into a tubular bun. Located in a shopping center, I’d rank it as the No. 1 reason to visit Poipu, with the snorkeling ranked second.

2. Kintaro, Kapa’a – This Kapa’a institution is unassuming enough (about as thrilling as a Benihana from the outside), but after a long day baking in the sun, this place’s parade of sushi, tepanyaki and other fresh locally caught fish is worth the long wait. On our night there, we enjoyed an incredible peanut-sauce mahi-mahi that may just be the best fish I’ve ever had.

3. Hanalei Taro & Juice Co., Hanalei – This little roadside shed packs a cornucopia of Kauai into its nice paper-plate lunches: Kalua pig, poi, lomi salmon, taro and coconut pudding bread, and taro mac salad (pictured at the top of this post). Much of the taro, if not all, is grown in the nearby taro fields, adding an extra dash of locavorism that can’t be dissed. The servers also dole out delicious smoothies (see Varenna’s smile, above) and ginger lemonade to die for.

4. Kilauea Farmers Market, Kilauea – Held every Tuesday at 4:30pm, the Kilauea Farmers Market starts in earnest with a car horn. It’s over within 30 minutes, as the fresh supply of locally grown apple bananas, papayas, herbs, veggies, and flowers are bought up quickly. I think I saw k.d. lang buying a coconut here, and I definitely ran into an old college buddy, who — as it turns out — is now a full-time farmer on Kauai. Stock up here if you’re renting a house and cooking your own meals.

5. Wishing Well Shave Ice, Hanalei – I personally thought the whole shave-ice experience in Kauai was overrated, until I had Wishing Wells snowball of sweet goodness: piña colada and coconut syrup ice served over Kona coffee ice cream. Took three quarts of water to recover from the teeth-sticking sweetness, but it was so worth it.

6. Kountry Kitchen, Kapa’a – Not much more to say about this country-styled breakfast joint other than two menu items: coconut French toast, and pumpkin-pie pancakes with macademia nuts.

7. Java Kai, Hanalei – True, it’s a bit of a franchise at this point, but I had no idea when Hailey, Varenna and I first walked into Java Kai off the main road in Hanalei. Turns out, we loved it enough to hit it three times on the trip: once for coffee, once again for crack-of-dawn breakfast sandwiches and more java, and a third time for an afternoon Thai coffee and Bone Builder Smoothie (which included pineapple, mango, banana, papaya, orange and ginger). Varenna and I split the smoothie, which may have been the best smoothie I’ve ever had.

8. Duke’s Restaurant, Lihue – Close to the airport and open on Thanksgiving: those were the only two credentials we were looking for on our last night on the island. Fortunately, Duke’s fit both bills, and not only did they serve a mean mai tai, a superb Thanksgiving buffet, and a heavenly seven-spiced ahi with papaya-mustard sauce — they also happened to have a sweet barefoot-on-the-beach vibe that served as the perfect send-off to our week in paradise.

So there you have it: Kauai’s best food and drink in one blog post. Hope the hyperbole wasn’t too overboard.

On the Friday morning before Thanksgiving, I had a feeling my brother was trying to talk us out of going to Waimea Canyon. It was a long drive, he noted. Time on Kauai was precious, and Varenna — our 8-month-old daughter — would be facing backwards for the whole ride. Poipu had a baby beach.

But I acted like the typical younger brother: the more he discouraged it, the more determined I was to go. This was a verdant miniature Grand Canyon, and at the end of the road was a window to the Na Pali Coast. Yes, time on Kauai is precious. But for me, that meant not letting a week slip by without seeing this magnificent sight.

True to his prediction, Varenna had her cranky spells. Who could blame her? Two hours of driving in paradise, facing backwards, on windy roads? Yeah, we were asking a lot of her. And yes, my brother and his family were probably having an awesome time snorkeling with tangs, Moorish idols and sea turtles in Poipu. But fortunately, Varenna’s crying always had a remedy: fresh-air and time in our arms.

She slept from Kapa’a all the way to the State Park’s edge, where we couldn’t resist stopping the car (and therefore, the nap) at a surreal red-water cascade. The series of waterfalls was like a Zen garden on the surface of Mars. I’d never seen anything like it, and truthfully, it was the prettiest scenery of the whole Waimea Canyon area.

A little up the road, we came up the canyon’s main lookout, which we had to share with another 100 people or so. And while overlooks are frustrating for a photographer (little room for creativity, chain-link foregrounds, the same photo everyone else has taken), the gorge’s majesty wasn’t lost on me. Here on a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean was a mile-wide canyon. How arbitrary.

I had fun trying something new with a tilt-shift lens, and then we moved on.

It had been uncharacteristically dry on Kauai leading up to and during our visit, which unfortunately meant that Waipoo Falls was dry and not even visible.

Beyond the Waipoo Falls turnout, views of the canyon come to an end, and the road climbs up into Kokee State Park. We stopped at a gift shop/restaurant, chased some roosters in the big field across the parking lot, and then made the final push to the two lookouts that gaze down at the Na Pali Coast from a cloud forest ridge.

When we got there, we were greeted by a wall of white. A gauzy mist hung in the air, obstructing the entire view of the Kalalau Valley. Fortunately, we’d read that this was the norm in the afternoon, and that to turn around and head back would be a mistake, as conditions are quick to change.

We spied a bright red songbird flying by, most likely an apapane, a species that only lives in the Hawaiian Island chain and which is critically endangered. It was a reminder that this wasn’t just some brochure paradise. It was a rare and fragile island ecosystem hanging by a thread.

The gauze began to separate within five minutes of our arrival, revealing the most vibrant blue I’ve ever seen in nature — the Pacific Ocean beneath the Na Pali Cliffs. Undulating green and red walls emerged, their sinewy shapes more reminiscent of muscles than mountains. And at last, a full view of the Kalalau Valley, one of the most famous sights in the Pacific.

We lingered for almost an hour, just quietly observing nature in motion. Smokey mist evaporating, then condensing, then lifting, then drifting over the tree tops. It reminded me more of Monteverde, Costa Rica than any other place in Hawaii, with one major difference: in place of distant monkeys calling, I heard the thumping rotors of tourist helicopters.

Oh well. You can’t claim Kauai is perfect, but its a pretty awesome island to behold.