The Other Side of Paradise

Lured by the famous “Hawaii Calls” radio broadcasts emanating from Honolulu’s grand old Ala Moana Hotel, my grandparents visited Waikiki back in the 1940s, when it was nothing but a pristine, underpopulated beach stretching to Diamond Head. Hawaii became my family’s occasional getaway from the eternal drizzle of our Washington hometown, a Finnish logging hamlet so sleepy the county dump closed forever in 1987 for lack of revenue. In my grandparents’ day, though, the place was a thriving boomtown, and they thrived on overwork there. Even though they sent their kids on retreats to Hawaii, they preferred to stay merrily chained to their desks 12 hours a day. In the early 1970s, my uncle finally persuaded them to take a break. They spent their first major vacation in decades on Waikiki.

Predictably, the trip backfired. Garish modern Waikiki shattered their rosy ‘40s memories with one glance. Appalled, they went straight home to Deep River and worked indefatigably, right up until illness felled them in their 80s. They regarded Hawaii as a paradise lost until the end of their days.

I would rather they’d been riding a mule on Molokai. My first visit to this most undeveloped of the Hawaiian islands revealed a place that reminded me more of my grandparents’ rustic Wahkiakum County, Wash., than it reminded me of Waikiki, just 22 miles away. Like Wahkiakum, Molokai has no stoplights, no cineplexes, no fast-food franchises, no buildings more than three stories high--just 6,700 people scattered among woods, cliffs, fields, beaches and eucalyptus rain-forest roads that seem to trail off into history.

Molokai comprises the highest concentration of native Hawaiians in the archipelago; the island reminds me of my hometown as much for its sturdy traditions and resistance to change than its isolated rural beauty. The landscape is the familiar Hawaiian spectrum of environments: a 135-year-old palm grove planted by King Kamehameha himself; roadside rows of those strange spiky pines that lead to a fancy golf course; white sand and red dirt, rain forest and arroyo-like valleys.

But in places, Molokai reminds me of Africa. Indeed, the African spiral-horned antelopes, dancing crowned cranes and oryxes and giraffes at the Molokai Ranch Wildlife Conservation Park on the west end of the peanut-shaped island apparently don’t mind their new home one bit.

Since the big pineapple companies closed down their operations in the late 1980s, Molokai hamlets like Maunaloa, just south of the Molokai Ranch, are well on their way to ghost-town status. The island’s unemployment rate is about twice the national average--the local paper reports the number of bankruptcies in Hawaii has doubled since 1991--and the cruise-and-shoot-the-breeze folkways are reminiscent of post-boom timber country.

The lights of Honolulu may twinkle expensively on the horizon, but on Molokai, things are much as they were when Captain Cook took one look at the place and passed it right by. He figured there was nothing happening on Molokai but failed to realize this is its great virtue. On the local TV news recently, the teaser before the broadcast was: “Find out what it’s like to run a business from a Quonset hut in the middle of town!”

This is a good moment to visit Molokai. You may very well see a humpback whale--the shallow passage between Molokai and Maui is where whales hang out between late November and May. A more reliable attraction is the most famous industry hereabout, the Molokai Mule Ride, run by the handlebar-mustachioed, spur-clickin’--and, no doubt, “Ee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee”-singin’--old mule skinner E. “Buzzy” Sproat, who’s back in action after three years. Those years were a time of high-stakes negotiations. Who should clean up the mule manure on the trail? And where should they put it? (Buzzy’s team does the shoveling, and the prized piles are donated to the flower beds of the Kalaupapa Peninsula.) With mule-shuttle diplomacy done, tourists once again can take the beasts down the 1,800-foot trail that winds its way to Kalaupapa. That first switchback out of the forest revealing the vast vista below can’t fail to astonish. (And whichever rider happens to be the most attractive woman in the group will, as in immemorial tradition, find one of Buzzy’s young male assistant mule skinners astride the beast directly behind her.)

Mule-riding is about as fast lane as it gets around Molokai. The biggest scene I saw on the island was the weekly concert of a ukulele-and-guitar lounge band called FIBRE, which performs under a century-old Bengalese banyan tree the size of Ygdrasil at the Pau Hana Inn. “Pau Hana” means roughly “no more work” or “quitting time,” and FIBRE stands for Friendly Island Band Rhythmic Experience. Each weekend, FIBRE proves that you can play “Hang On, Sloopy,” “The Game of Love” and many other oldies to the bass line of “Louie, Louie.” But I found that on the way back to my hotel after the concert, with my convertible top down and more stars than I’ve ever seen in Hawaii coruscating overhead, the sound of the roadside crickets was actually louder than the band had been.

But locals can listen to crickets any old night. On the nights when FIBRE gigs on the banyan-tree terrace, revelers’ cars overflow the hotel parking lot and spill out onto the adjoining fields. When a teenager who can’t get into the banyan bar hangs out at the fast-food drive-in in Molokai’s big town, four-block-long Kaunakakai, and wears a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, the shirt’s sentiment has a local angle. The point is that a kid in Molokai might very well regard the machine of modern civilization as the subject to be raged at and the good old natural wonderland of his home isle as a refuge from said machine. (My only rage was against the Kaunakakai drive-in itself, a dreadful grease pit that made me feel like wearing a “Rage Against the Hockey Puck-Like Burrito” T-shirt.)

The kids here are proud that they don’t have urban ills to match Oahu’s. Even neighboring Maui suffers daily gridlock in the mini-sprawl of downtown Kahului, but not Molokai. “Molokai mo’ friendly,” says one of the kids hanging out downtown in Maunaloa. “Surf is perfect, fishing is perfect. Oahu? Too much gangs and drugs.” (Indeed, the crime problem on Oahu is such that rental cars have alarms that go off if the ignition doesn’t turn over within seven seconds of the key touching the door.)

“We got the longest sandy beach in Hawaii, bra [brother]!” brags one kid. Another sums up Molokai’s attractions thus: “No too much hassle, no mo’ murder, no mo’ traffic, no mo’ Burger King, hard to get any crime.”

Yet Gabriel Kahookano, 13, notes that there is a certain irony in Molokai’s nickname, The Friendly Isle. “Some tourists act stupid,” he says. “They snob us--they act like we bad people.”

I detect a distinct hint of xenophobia in another group of young people hanging out at the far east end of the island--the Halawa Valley, past the four-block metropolis of Kaunakakai, all the way to where Highway 450 dead-ends at a protected ocean inlet. “You can’t park there, bra,” one local surfer tells me in a tone more firm than friendly.

When I turn around, leaving the beach to the kids, and head off to check out the trail to the falls at Halawa--”one of the best walks on Molokai,” according to J.D. Bisignani’s helpful “Maui Handbook” (which includes Molokai and Lanai)--I find a sign posted at the trail head, which reads, in part: “Molokai the friendly??? Notice to all visitors: The trail to the Halawa Falls crosses over private Kuleana land and is close [sic] to all visitors. Visitors be on the alert, you will be tricked by some unknown person who will charge you some amount of dollars and give you a verbal or written permite [sic]. It is a violation.”

I drive back and ask the surfer kids what the deal is. “Too much people getting hurt and suing the guy, bra,” one says. He didn’t seem keenly disappointed at the downturn in tourist traffic at his spectacular end of the island, the site of a large 1,300-year-old, intricately terraced taro-growing settlement until the tsunami of 1946 washed it away.

No matter. The road from Halawa at the east end of the island to Pukoo, about one-third of the way westward to Kaunakakai, is a spectacle in itself, with a few splendid turnoffs to take in the view and bliss out. It’s a tiny, lose-your-blues highway with hair-raising, narrow hairpin turns reminiscent of Maui’s celebrated Hana Highway, only not so overgrown, and much less traffic-clogged.

Two turnoffs before Halawa, there’s a place where you can park, walk past a few beer cans left by rude locals or tourists and onto a promontory with an L-shaped rock that serves as a perfect comfy chair for viewing nine serrated bays pounded satisfyingly by lengthy parallel, white-capped waves way below. I see not one soul and feel myself to occupy a stone throne.

I can relax, because I’d left a pauper’s paucity of possessions back in my car. Even in low-crime Molokai, a rental car might as well bear the vanity plate “CLUELESS HAOLE.” I make a habit of carrying my license, car key, Visa card and $40 in one of those waterproof necklace boxes they sell for cheap at dive shops.

All my adventures up to this point have been on the main part of Molokai, referred to as “Topside” by the residents of the Kalaupapa Peninsula, at the bottom of those vertiginous cliffs the mule ride takes you down. The next day I drive up to the mule barn, saddle up and bump on down to Kalaupapa.

when your wobbly bowlegs step off your mule on the peninsula, you will probably meet tour guide Richard Marks. “I’m the local radical,” he explains. “If you don’t grumble, the blood don’t flow.”

Marks is sheriff of Kalawao County, the smallest in America, home to the 62 survivors of Hansen’s disease (leprosy) who live here on government pensions in modest homes with million-dollar views. The entire island seems to have a subtle melancholy about it, but Kalaupapa was, for about 100 years after King Kamehameha decreed it a medical prison in 1865, a human-made hell in a heavenly setting. Though Marks, 64, benefited from the sulfa drugs and thalidomide that came into use for treating Hansen’s after the 1940s and so does not appear obviously impaired, he calls himself a leper.

Marks owns and leads Damien Tours, the service that gives you the privilege of spending a day in the Hansen’s disease settlement, which is also a kind of shrine to Father Damien, the Belgian minister who worked stubbornly to help the sufferers, ignored the psychologically maiming traditions that kept the sick and the well strictly separated, and died of the disease.

Leprosy was epidemic in biblical times, but by now virtually everyone in the developed world has natural immunity to it, and new cases can be swiftly arrested. Even in the undeveloped world, where millions still suffer from Hansen’s, the World Health Organization predicts that it will be eradicated soon. And people who have it are only contagious to the tiny minority who lack immunity. The old folks who populate Kalaupapa are not contagious. So if you take the Damien tour, the perils you face run toward ignoring the signs on the railings and plunging to your silly tourist’s death off the cliffs.

By state law, you’re not to refer to Hansen’s disease victims as lepers, but Marks has the right, and his motive is clearly not all commercial. He spends his days trying to erase the stigma of what was called “The Separation Sickness.” “My own brother told me, ‘You’re shaming the family by saying you’re a leper,’ ” Marks says.

Marks’ family was devastated by Hansen’s, even though it was by no means the worst epidemic that outsiders brought to the immunologically vulnerable islands. “Leprosy did the least damage of all the diseases that came to Hawaii,” says Marks, “but it was the only disease that they’d lock up families for. They were still doing it in the ‘60s. They called them ‘inmates.’ Until a few years back, they were ‘paroled,’ not ‘discharged.’ ” When permitted to speak with non-ailing friends, it was through chain-link fences. Their mail and clothing were fumigated with formaldehyde. The highest sea cliffs on earth rise awe-inspiringly behind the villagers, but they once functioned as bars on a very capacious cage.

Lots of well-meaning visitors tell Marks that, if you must suffer from Hansen’s, Molokai is a nice place to have it. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky to live here!’ Bull----. Hawaii is full of paradise places. They never came here for the scenery,” says Marks.

My visit to Kalaupapa was the highlight of my trip to Molokai and the most interesting experience I’ve had in the Hawaiian islands. When the sun burst through the stained-glass windows in the church Father Damien built, I thought I was going to cry. But I was never depressed.

Even so, after such a soul-satisfying, intellectually stimulating excursion, there’s nothing like a nice, mindless walk down a deserted strand with waves rhythmically rinsing the sugary sand from between your toes.

Papohaku Beach, located topside on the island’s northwest coast, a few miles north of Maunaloa and the Molokai Ranch, and adjacent to the lovely little low-rise Kaluakoi Hotel & Golf Club, is precisely the place for such a stroll. Papohaku is God’s gift to the sandcastle architect. And after the tide demolishes your work, the Kaluakoi poolside restaurant is a nice place to nurse a self-parodying umbrella drink you’d otherwise never dream of ordering.

Kaluakoi is as highfalutin an accommodation as you can find on Molokai. It amounts to a golf course, a tennis court and a restaurant, Ohia Lodge, with a dress code quite a lot more latitudinarian than, say, the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Basically, the rule is no shoes, no shirt, no sherbet, and you ought to wear a jacket of some sort.

I don’t golf, but I like the layout of Kaluakoi’s greens, which slope gracefully from my room’s back porch to the other beach on the resort, little Kepuhi Bay. With no tall grass for crickets to hide in, the loudest sound I heard at night in Kaluakoi was a fat frog hopping across the lawn outside my window and splash-landing in a tiny mud puddle formed by drip from an occluded drain spout.

The Kaluakoi’s restaurant is not bad, but rather generic. The preferred eatery on the island, now that the renowned Mid-Nite Inn burned down, is Jo Jo’s Cafe in Maunaloa, 10 minutes from Kaluakoi. Its cozy, semicircular wooden booths, old plantation-style bar and tidy stacks of magazines make it a delightful hangout, and the fried chicken and curried fresh-caught fish dishes hit the spot for a fair price.

Jo Jo’s is not open for breakfast--either grab your jacket and hit Kaluakoi’s restaurant or check out the Kualapuu Cookhouse on the way to the ancient Phallic Rock, where Molokai women used to pray for fertility. The simplest and cheapest dining option of all is the Kanemitsu Bakery in downtown Kaunakakai, where they bake breads containing everything but the frog outside my window.

There are other things to do on Molokai: take a snorkeling boat trip; a horseback ride through back country where your rental car would never dare; buy a kite or a Balinese mask at the Christmas-light-bedizened Big Wind Kite Factory in Maunaloa; go whale-watching; check out the Paniolo Heritage Rodeo in March or the Cowhorse Classic in June (they’ll let you do your own wrangling), or visit the big hula festivals (on March 22-24, May 18 and June 18-20 this year). Exponents of the Halau Hula ‘O Kukuna’okala, an academy of classical indigenous dance, insist that the hula originated on Molokai.

But here’s my favorite thing to do on Molokai: not one damn thing. As local sage Richard Marks sums up the Molokai philosophy: “No worry! Worry makes it happen.”

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GUIDEBOOK / Mo’ Molokai

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for Hawaii is 808. Hotel prices are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: American, Delta, Continental, Hawaiian Air and United airlines fly nonstop from Los Angeles to Honolulu. From there or Maui, Air Molokai, Hawaiian Air, Island Air, Mahalo Air and Trans Air fly to Molokai. The Maui Princess, (800) 833-5800, a gyro-stabilized yacht, shuttles from Molokai’s wharf to Maui’s Lahaina for $70 round-trip or $35 one-way. (The 90-minute Maui-Molokai run is best for whale watching because going the other way, the surf splashes the top deck, the best vantage point.) Overnight packages on Maui, including car and hotel, are available in conjunction with Princess crossings from Molokai. Cars on Molokai can be rented through Budget and Dollar--reserve well in advance and reconfirm prior to arrival. If you arrive after 6 p.m., the offices may be closed. Shuttle service is available through Kukui Tours & Limousine, 553-5133, and Molokai Off-Road Tours & Taxi, 533-1233.

Where to stay: Kaluakoi Villas, P.O. Box 350, Maunaloa, Hawaii 96770, (800) 525-1470, and Kaluakoi Hotel & Golf Club, P.O. Box 1977, Maunaloa, Hawaii 96770, (800) 777-1700. Decent rooms with large windows but no air conditioning; access to Papohaku and Kepuhi beaches. Villa rates: $95-$185. Hotel rate: About $120. Hotel Molokai, P.O. Box 546, Kam V Highway, Kaunakakai, Hawaii 96748, (800) 423-6656. Rooms with Polynesian ambience. Rates: $59-$125. Wavecrest Resort Condominiums, (800) 535-0085. On the road to Halawa, these condos are secluded even by Molokai standards. Rates: $109-$169.

Where to eat: Jo Jo’s Cafe, Maunaloa Highway, 552-2803, has a good, if limited, menu of fish and chicken; $20-$30. Outpost Natural Foods, Makaena Place in Kaunakakai, 553-3377. Juice bar, burritos, fresh produce. Lunch only; $10. The Kanemitsu Bakery, 79 Ala Malama, 553-5855, sells famous but overrated Molokai breads, $1.75, and pastries. French bread is sold straight out of the oven from 9:30 p.m to 3 a.m.

Things to do: The Molokai Mule Ride, P.O. Box 200, Kualapuu, Hawaii, 96757, (800) 567-7550. A picnic lunch, ride and tour of Kalaupapa are included for $120. Or skip the mule ride and take a 10-minute flight into Kalaupapa Airport, a crushed-coral runway, for $88. Damien Tours, P.O. Box 1, Kalaupapa, Hawaii 96742, 567-6171, gives tours of Kalaupapa, which includes Father Damien’s church; $30 per person for four hours (all you’ll have time for if you’re mule-transported).

For more information: Moloka’i Visitors Assn., P.O. Box 960, Kaunakakai, Molokai, 96748; (800) 800-6367. Hawaii Visitors Bureau, 350 Fifth Ave., Suite 827, New York, NY 10118; (800) GO-HAWAII, fax (212) 947-0725.