It’s dawn in the small coastal community of Kealakekua, on the west coast of Hawaii, aka The Big Island. As the sun begins to rise behind the smouldering mound of Mauna Loa, the Milky Way — as clear in the night sky as a smudge of chalk dust on a blackboard — fades away behind a film of blue. The chirping coqui frogs call it a day (or a night, as they head for the dark, lush cover of the forest floor to rest their vocal chords). In the green glistening fields of Greenwell Farms, Matt Carter is making his first rounds — to check on the tiny red coffee cherries that his world revolves around.
For the past eight years, Matt has worked as the retail store and tour operations manager at this fifth-generation family farm, where the Greenwell family has lived and worked since 1850. He leads tours, arranges experiences and trains the farm’s guides, sharing the story of a family whose roots stretch back to Henry Greenwell, who traveled from Durham, England, to Hawaii and eventually whose descendants made Kona coffee their main enterprise.
But Matt brings another perspective to the visitor experience, too. Before working at Greenwell Farms, he spent more than three decades in the classroom. For him, meeting travelers like those who visit on Trafalgar’s Hawaii Four Island Adventure tour is an extension of that life as an educator — an opportunity to share what he knows, to learn from others and, perhaps most importantly, to look at Hawaii as if through fresh eyes.
“I’ve never had a day quite like today.”
Every morning, Matt begins simply: a glass of water; thirty minutes of stretching; a moment to step outside and take in the electric green landscape around him. Then, he says, he tries to welcome whatever comes next.
“I’ve never had a day quite like today,” he likes to say, borrowing a line from Maya Angelou. “I want to greet each new day, each moment without judgement,” he says. It’s a philosophy that seems particularly suited to life here, where constant volcanic activity means no two days look the same — quite literally, where upwelling lava in the ocean, or from the summit of Mauna Loa, is forever terraforming the ground beneath your feet.
“I embrace the good, bad, weird, crazy, ugly, ridiculous all as part of a cumulative life experience”, he explains. That openness has become his overall motivation, both in his work and in life. And it perhaps explains why, after decades as a teacher, he still finds himself fascinated by the people who arrive to visit Greenwell Farms.
“I learn as much from others as they do from me.”
Today, visitors arrive at the farm from across the world — sometimes from as many as 30 different countries in a single week. Matt enjoys sharing the stories of the farm and its coffee, but what he loves just as much is the conversation that follows.
“Absolutely, without question,” he says when asked whether he learns from the people he meets. “A lot of times the questions that people ask, over a certain number of years, you tend to gather the answers. But we’re still always surprised with new questions.” And when he doesn’t know the answer? “It stimulates me to go find it out and learn a little bit more”, he says. “I learn as much from others as they do from me… and that’s the part I love the most about what I do.”
“Aloha is really about a sense of connection.”
One of the first learnings visitors to Matt’s corner of the world will have is that life on the Big Island doesn’t look much like the images of Hawaii popularized by the Pan Am posters. For many first-time visitors, the mental image is of palm trees, beaches, and Mai Tais by the pool.
Matt doesn’t dismiss that version of the islands. If relaxing beside a pool is your idea of a good time, he says, “ there’s nothing wrong with that.” But stay a little longer, explore a little further and another Hawaii begins to emerge. “The longer you spend here, the more subtle and nuanced it becomes and the more deeply you see into it,” he says.
On the Big Island, that means landscapes shaped by incessant tectonic activity, including an active volcano in Mauna Loa, but it also means looking beyond the scenery to the culture and history that continue to shape everyday life. Matt is particularly passionate about helping visitors understand that Hawaii was once a kingdom with a rich history, culture and worldview rooted deeply in Polynesian traditions.
The kingdom might have fallen away, but for many native Hawaiians, the worldview remains as strong as ever — and at the heart of it, he says, is connection. “That’s what Hawaii’s most famous phrase ‘Aloha’ is all about — a sense of connection,” Matt explains, “about honoring the way that human beings rely on each other to survive.”
“I am forced to come out of my cave from time to time.”
If you were to look up the word ‘Aloha’ in the dictionary, it would tell you that as well as connection, it can also mean peace. And as he looks towards retirement, Matt can feel himself being drawn deeper into the sense of peace his personal interests offer — albeit at the risk of becoming, in his words, “something of a hermit”.
“I’m building a woodworking shop and I intend to disappear into it,” he says with a sheepish grin. There is just one problem. His wife is, by his own description, a social butterfly. “She knows everybody,” Matt says. Between pickleball, singing and musical groups, she has plenty of reasons to pull him back out into the world. “So I’ll be forced to come out of my cave from time to time.”
For someone who spends his working life meeting people from around the globe, his desire for solitude may seem ironic. But speaking to him, it becomes clear that it’s not so much about separating himself from other people — it’s more about reconnecting with himself, the materials in his hand, and his place in the greater arena of space and time.
He believes that you can crave both solitude and connection at the same time, and that they can even compliment each other — in the same way the volcanic forces at work beneath Hawaii’s surface are violently destructive, they’re also a rich sources of life.
“Commitment and courage create confidence and competency.”
When asked for his words to live by, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Matt’s choice brings together many of the themes that run through his story: learning, patience, curiosity and the willingness to keep going even when you’re not yet good at something.
Recently, he came across a phrase that stayed with him: “Commitment and courage create confidence and competency.” He thinks about it in relation to his future woodworking ambitions. He knows he isn’t yet where he wants to be, but he also knows that capability comes through practice.
“If I’m committed to it and I’m courageous about trying new things and learning, then the capability and the confidence will come,” he says. “You have to trust in that process.”
Travel asks something similar of us. To enter somewhere unfamiliar. To ask questions. To be comfortable not knowing everything. To slow down when the world around us moves differently. To stay open to the unexpected.
And perhaps, most importantly, to remember that we don’t have to control every moment for it to be meaningful. For Matt, that means embracing the good, the bad, the strange and everything in between. Because, after all, there’s no such thing as an ordinary day.
As he would say: “I’ve never had a day quite like today.”