Dan's Papers - April 20, 2009 - Molokai, Lanai and Kauai

Years ago, when the Hamptons were not as busy year around as they are now, I used to shut down Dan's Papers in the fall, and, until spring, vacation for the four winter months in some exotic spot.

These destinations included St. Croix, the south of France, the Canary Islands, Mazatlan, Mexico and the island of Maui in Hawaii.

Recently, we returned to Hawaii, this time, 36 years later, to visit several other islands in the chain, which more mirrored what Maui was like in the rough and ready old days. Maui itself, which we also visited five years ago, is all developed and "Californiaized," as the locals call it. If you want to golf, hotel and rent a condo and a car, go to Maui.

The island of Molokai is the only one of the six Hawaiian islands to have successfully resisted resort development. Today, Molokai consists of about 7,000 local Hawaiians who keep to the old ways. They welcome visitors, but they don't go out of their way for them. Many residents of this island still fish the local waters, grow fruits and vegetables in their tiny backyards and drive pickup trucks. They are family people, and extended families often get together, sometimes by the hundreds, for feasts, weddings, funerals and other important events in meeting halls, small wooden churches or at a wide variety of oceanfront camp grounds that sit where on other islands there might be fine resorts that cater to the tourists.

To get there, in Honolulu we boarded a twin-engine propeller plane. It was pretty full. Chris found a seat in the back. I found a seat in the middle. There was a blond surfer woman next to me. Across were a young man and a middle-aged woman. I overhead them talking. The words "East Hampton" was mentioned. The woman Judy Springer, owned Springer's, a clothing store on Newtown Lane, and now manages Brunello Cucinelli, its successor. Her son, Noah, an avid surfer was sitting next to her. Noah's wife, Dominique, was sitting next to me. They had a place on the ocean in Molokai. Now how odd is that?

The island itself is 32 miles long and two miles wide. The western half is desert, occupied for years and years by the Molokai Ranch. The eastern half is wet and lush, and has what might be the most beautiful valley in all of Hawaii, a magnificent gorge that reaches a mountainside, down which flows the tallest waterfall in the state. It is accessible by a narrow, 13-mile long twisty road of switchbacks overlooking the sea. It is quite an experience to go to the Halawa Bay Valley.

There is a single town on the island, called Kaunakakai. It is three blocks long, all hot and dusty, with old wooden buildings constructed as shops in the 1940s and earlier. Down a street is a long pier where freight arrives and where Molokai reaches out to the rest of the world.

The islanders, now also include Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and other foreigners, all of whom were brought in to work for the Libby Pineapple Company that raised fruit on the island from 1900 to 1985. Molokai has few cars. Driving anywhere, you only rarely come across any one of them. At night, it is dark and quiet on the island.

It is a rare thing indeed to visit such a place in the United States. Guidebooks say don't try to like Molokai. Wait and Molokai will like you. It is as good a saying as any.

Our introduction to Molokai began with our making a reservation at a bed and breakfast on the dry part of the island. The owner of it asked for a deposit. When I asked if he had a pen to take a credit card number, he said just send a check in the mail. He didn't use credit cards. On the island, I found that my attempt to get a rental car by Internet had failed. There weren't any cars. Instead, I wound up having the use of a 22-year-old Buick sedan for 50 bucks. Some parts of it worked. Others didn't. It was wheels. And it gives you an idea how this island works.

There is no tourist resort on this island. But there was an attempt to create one, a resort that would have been among the world's largest, during a six-year battle with the tourists that ended in defeat for the developer last August.

The developer bought the 40,000-acre Molokai Ranch and with the approval of the County of Maui (Molokai is part of Maui), began building a resort that might in the end have rivaled Cancun on the dry west coast. They built a small lodge, some condos, golf course and tennis club and riding stables at first, then, unveiled their grand plan, which would result in the development of five miles of coastline and the arrival of thousands of tourists.

Maui approved that too. But the islanders, organizing to defend their way of life, discovered that the way this new development intended to get its water - otherwise unavailable in this desert region - would be to pipe it over from the lush east end where they were. They brought this to the attention of the EPA, the EPA saw it for what it was - the drying up of the farmland in the west - and demanded the developers build a desalination plant or find some other way to get water. The developers responded by telling the islanders to lay off, and instead support them. If they would not cooperate, then the development would shut down and all these jobs would be lost. The locals did not back down. The resort shut last August and is now boarded up. All along the dusty roads, we saw signs reading NO KA'A, which was the name of the development. So much for development on Molokai.

Things to do on Molakai

* Take the mule ride down to the leper colony located on a sea level peninsula that juts out a mile from the main body of the island. It's a terrifying half an hour down a cliff face on a switch back road and then three quarters of an hour back up. The mule goes slower up. There is no other way to get there, which is sort of the point. Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when leprosy was an incurable and highly contagious disease, lepers from all over the world were brought to Molokai and essentially pushed overboard from ships bringing them to either sink or swim. They founded a town on the peninsula and under the care of Father Damion, who was later given sainthood, died there. Leprosy became fully treatable by 1970 and in 1985 the colony was closed down. Three people with leprosy still live at the colony, by choice, and since leprosy is no longer contagious, you will meet them when you go down there.

* Since a reef off the south shore of this island makes the water on the coast shallow and calm, around 1200 A.D. the natives built rock walls in the shallows to serve as ways to catch fish. The rocks would be horseshoe shaped against the mainland, and the fish would come in through holes in the rocks, feed, grow larger and then be unable to get back out. The natives to this day go out into these ponds and gather the fish in nets.

* Every evening, natives and tourists gather in the waterfront restaurant at the Molokai Hotel just south of Kaunakakai where, as the sun sets, the locals play Hawaiian favorites on ukuleles and other instruments.

* We stayed at a wonderful bed and breakfast up in Mauna Loa, the nearly abandoned town built for the resort that never happened on the western end of the island. Karyl and Tom, formerly from a small town in Michigan where Tom retired from the insurance business, are great hosts and we highly recommend their place, which they call Molokai Komohana Bed and Breakfast. 808-552-2781.

Be sure to arrange a car rental way ahead. There are only a few of them.

Lanai is the other inhabited small island not far off Maui, but it is as different from Molokai as night is to day. It's a round island about 12 miles in diameter and when the Dole Pineapple Company came, as it did to Molokai, it found only a small number of Hawaiian natives on the island. To farm the land - it bought the entire island - it brought in immigrant laborers from the Phillipines, Portugal, China and Japan, and they put them up in a camp in the very center of the island, which they named Lanai City. It was thus only a short walk in every direction to the fields at the start of the day and a short walk back.

In 1987, the Dole Company announced it would cease producing pineapples on Lanai. But since it had completely denuded the rolling hills of the island of all vegetation to plant pineapples, it felt honor bound to not just abandon the natives there. It continued planting pineapples until a new source of jobs could be found on the island. It also continued to own the land, and do so to this day, so that whatever business came in would benefit them too.

In 1997, the white glove service hotel chain known as Four Seasons Resorts opened two magnificent hotels on Lanai, one on the coast and one just outside of Lanai City. Today, several thousand people work for either that resort, or for the government, or for some of the many businesses that serve tourists on the island.

Lanai City, where the laborers lived, has become a charming little town with a dozen or so tourist shops and local stores surrounding a grand park in the very center of town. Since the island remains private, all the roads and beaches are maintained by Castle and Cook, the firm that was created to handle Dole's interests on the island. To open a shop, you see Castle and Cook. They review what you plan to do and if they like it, then they approve it. Shops in Lanai City include Gifts with Aloha, Blue Ginger Coffee Works, Mike Carroll Gallery, Lana'I Playhouse, Café 565, the Pine Isle Market and Dis N' Dat Shop among others. There's a Lana'i School, a laundromat, a canoe rental, several churches, two branches of the Bank of Hawaii and the Lana'i Company Administration Building.

There are not many places to drive on Lanai. But the views as you drive are spectacular as you get there. Many roads now feature long rows of giant pine trees, and, framing the road as they do, remind you a bit of the south of France. It's another perk from Castle and Cook.

At the western end of the island is Shipwreck Beach, where an old World War II Navy Vessel washed up and remains to this day. There's a small beach where the workers and their families went when they were out on strike in the old days. It's called Federation Camp and has its own beach.

There's a former tiny village with a church on the east side of the island, and there's a plain where you can visit giant colorful boulders that have collected there as various volcanic eruptions have gone off. It's called Garden of the Gods.

Without a doubt, the two Four Seasons Resorts on the island are about as fine a five-star experience that you can find anywhere in the world. One, on the mountain by Lanai City, is called Kaeole Lodge. The other, on the ocean along the grand arc of a white beach, is called Malale Bay. Shuttle busses run between them and if you stay at one, you have the full run of the other.

The mountain lodge features an 18-hole golf course and a horseback riding stable. The oceanfront facility has fresh and saltwater swimming, a spa, several restaurants and still another 18-hole golf course. The service at both these places is gracious and first class and wherever you turn, you are greeted with an "Aloha" and a smile.

Kauai is a much larger island than either Molokai or Lanai and offers the full Hawaiian experience, from shopping centers to old Hawaiian towns, from fabulous beaches to a great canyon, from a rainforest that is the wettest place on the planet to jagged mountains fit for hiking to oceanfront resorts such as Sheratons, Grand Hyatts and Marriots. The northwest corner of the island is so spectacular that it is unpassable. And the southeast corner of the island features a group of oceanfront resort hotels that comprise Poipu Beach. Elvis Presley made all his movies in Kaua'i and the resort he stayed at and which figured into some of his movies, Coconut Grove, is still there.

We stayed at the Marriot Hotel on the beach adjacent to the main town on the island, which is called Lihue. The Marriot has 500 rooms and towers that rise to 15 stories and cluster around a spectacular swimming pool with giant porpoise statues that spit water in great arcs high into the air and over into far corners of the pool. The staff is friendly and helpful. They have numerous restaurants and lounges and a spa, all of which are in buildings that surround the giant swimming pool - with the beach and the surf just beyond. It was quite a treat.

While we were there, surfers way offshore of the Marriott Beach had to be rescued due to high surf. On another occasion, we were taken to a traditional Hawaiian Luau on the ocean at the Sheraton Hotel at Poipu Beach. There was a buffet of all sorts of local foods, including pigs' feet and poi, which is a sticky white goo that tastes a little like southern grits.

It's fair to say that nowhere in Hawaii did we experience the economic downturn so much as we experienced it along the eastern seaboard. There were numerous real estate projects that had stopped in mid-construction. But the stores were notably busy and the traffic everywhere was heavy.

We rented a red Mustang convertible in Kauai. It's real Hawaii, Kauai is. Along one beach road, we encountered about a dozen wind surfers negotiating surf with 20-foot waves, riding over them and then leaping, with the aid of the parachute, sometimes 20 feet into the air. It was nothing like what you might find at home in Napeague. Although when I asked some of the surfers if he heard of the windsurfing done on Long Island, he answered immediately -Montauk. A great surfing ground.

Kauai is also the home to the late, great surfing legend Eddie Akau. Akau won practically every event he ever entered and was famous in the 1980s as someone who, when faced with an impossible surf 40 feet high, which had all the other surfers saying, "We ought to come back tomorrow," would just shrug and go out there.

A famous phrase in Hawaii is "Eddie would go." It can refer to almost anything dangerous. And he would have.

Akau died on his surfboard while trying to rescue other surfers in a storm between Kauai and Honolulu in 1978. He is the Babe Ruth of surfing, and a surfing competition that bears his name is held every year. It requires that there be surf between 20 and 40 feet and can take place whenever the surf is that high between December and February. In 20 years, it has been held only four times because only in four years was there surf that high. This past year was another when there was no contest. There was an announcement in the paper to that effect. Wait 'til next year.