Western Kauai

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Hanapepe

This West Kauai hamlet is becoming a haven for artists, but finding them requires some vigilance. The center of town is off Highway 50; turn right on Hanapepe Road just after Eleele if you're driving from Lihue. First, you'll smell the chips at the sumptuous lavender Taro Ko Chips Factory, located in an old green plantation house at 3940 Hanapepe Rd. Cooked in a tiny, modest kitchen at the east end of town, these famous taro chips are handmade by the farmers who grow the taro in a nearby valley. Despite their breakable nature, these chips make great gifts to go. To really impress them back home, get the authentic Hawaiian li hing mui-flavored chips.

Our very favorite Hanapepe store is the Banana Patch Studio, 3865 Hanapepe Rd. (tel. 808/335-5944; www.bananapatchstudio.com). For the best prices on the island for tropical plates and cups, hand-painted tiles, artwork, handmade soaps, pillows with tropical designs, and jewelry, this is the place. Plus, they will pack and ship for you anywhere. Farther along, Hanapepe Road is lined with gift shops and galleries, including Koa Wood Gallery, with its koa furniture, koa photo albums, and Norfolk pine bowls; and the corny but cherubic Aloha Angels, where everything is angel-themed or angel-related. The Kauai Village Gallery offers abstract and surreal paintings by Kauai artist Lew Shortridge, while nearby Kauai Fine Arts offers an odd mix that works: antique maps and prints of Hawaii, authentic Polynesian tapa (bark cloth), rare wiliwili seed leis, old Matson liner menus, and a few pieces of contemporary island art. Down the street, the Kim Starr Gallery, showing only Kim Starr's oil paintings, pastels, drawings, and limited-edition graphics, is a strong positive note in Hanapepe's art community. Taking a cue from Maui's Lahaina, where every Friday night is Art Night, Hanapepe's gallery owners and artists recently instituted the Friday Night Art Walk from 6 to 9pm. Gallery owners take turns hosting this informal event along Hanapepe Road.

Waimea

Neighboring Waimea is filled with more edibles than art. Kauai's favorite native supermarket, Big Save, serves as the one-stop shop for area residents and passersby heading for the uplands of Kokee State Park, some 4,000 feet above this sea-level village. For more hard-to-find delicious gourmet items, try the Ishihara Market, where they have marinated meals, freshly made poke, and a range of prepared picnic items. A cheerful distraction for lovers of Hawaiian collectibles is Collectibles and Fine Junque, on Highway 50, next to the fire station on the way to Waimea Canyon. This is where you'll discover what it's like to be the proverbial bull in a china shop. (Even a knapsack makes it hard to get through the aisles.) Heaps of vintage linens, choice aloha shirts and muumuus, rare glassware (and junque, too), books, ceramics, authentic 1950s cotton chenille bedspreads, and a back room full of bargain-priced secondhand goodies always capture our attention. You never know what you'll find in this tiny corner of Waimea.

Up in Kokee State Park, the gift shop of the Kokee Natural History Museum (tel. 808/335-9975) is the stop for botanical, geographical, historical, and nature-related books and gifts, not only on Kauai, but on all the islands. Audubon bird books, hiking maps, and practically every book on Kauai ever written line the shelves.

Ultimate Kauai Souvenir: The Red Dirt Shirt -- If you are looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-pack souvenir of your trip to Kauai or gifts for all the friends and relatives back home, check out the Red Dirt Shirt. Every T-shirt is hand-dyed and unique. The shirts were the result of a bad situation turned into a positive one. The "legend" is that Paradise Sportswear, in Waimea (tel. 808/335-5670; www.dirtshirt.com), lost the roof of their warehouse during Hurricane Iniki in 1992. After the storm passed, employees returned to the building to find all their T-shirts covered with Kauai's red soil. Before throwing out their entire inventory as "too soiled to sell," someone had an idea -- sell the shirts as a Kauai "Red Dirt Shirt." The grunge look was just starting to be popular. Unbelievable as it is, people took to these "dirt" shirts. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and the shirts have numerous outlets on Kauai.

There's also an interesting story behind how these T-shirts are dyed. Paradise Sportswear is a true community effort. They employ families who, due to family or disability challenges, prefer to work from home. Their employees take ordinary white T-shirts home and dye the shirts in vats with red dirt collected from valleys on Kauai where centuries of erosion have concentrated red iron oxide into the dirt. It's this red iron oxide that is used in the tinting agent, along with some other organic compounds to the dye solution that ensure that your dirt shirt will keep its red-dirt color.

The best prices on the Red Dirt Shirts can be found at the factory by the Port Allen Small Boat Harbor, open daily 9am to noon and 1 to 4pm. You can watch the silk-screening process or purchase a few shirts from the retail shop, which has everything from T-shirts for infants to XXXXL. The deals are on the factory seconds and discontinued designs.