Travel: Where Old Hawaii Lives On

If you’ve gone to Hawaii only once, you’ve probably visited Oahu, Maui, or the Big Island. These destinations are lovely, of course, but more and more they are likely to elicit the "I wish I'd come here 20 years ago" response. Kauai, however, still has that Old Hawaii charm. Basically it’s a matter of scale. Oahu and Kauai are about the same size, but Kauai has only about 60,000 residents to Oahu’s 900,000.

The island, roughly round and 33 miles across at its widest point, is nearly ringed by a two-lane coastal highway that connects a string of small country towns, where you’ll see ranchers driving muddy pickups with a dog in the back. The first plantation in the islands was established on Kauai, and agriculture on its emerald coastal plains and valleys remains a key part of its identity.

Only one plantation is still operating, but the locals still hunt wild pigs in the abandoned sugar cane fields and in the mountainous interior, which is too rugged for roads. Wild roosters seem to be everywhere, and hotels taller than a coconut tree (four stories) are not allowed.

Here are some suggestions for an itinerary that will liberate you from pricey resorts, transport you into rain forests and mountains, and show you why Hollywood directors have selected the island’s unblemished vistas for locations for more than 70 films, from South Pacific to Jurassic Park. (And for more ideas visit www.kauaidiscovery.com.)

Start your exploration on a full stomach with a taste of Kauai's culinary history. Hamura Saimin (808-245-3271), not far from the main airport in Lihue (population 6,000), is a hole-in-the-wall with a friendly diner ambience. Though it’s on a back street across from a Salvation Army loading dock, it’s often crowded and is consistently rated the best restaurant on the island. Last year it won the America’s Classics award from the James Beard Foundation.

You’ll find savvy haoles (non-natives) from gated communities rubbing elbows with the local working class and enjoying Hamura’s renowned saimin, a sort of Hawaiian gumbo. It evolved in the plantation era, when Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Hawaiian, and Filipino workers all socialized together, especially at potluck dinners. Their culinary legacy is most commonly expressed as big bowls of savory broth filled with freshly made noodles and whatever else inspires the cook: scallions, sliced boiled eggs, won tons, fish cake, sausage, bits of ham, etc.

At Hamura's, you can have a whole meal for less than $10, including a slice of delicate lilikoi (passion fruit) chiffon pie. No reservations, no credit cards—and, as a faded sign on the wall says, no chewing gum under the countertop, please.

Next head west along the southern coast to the village of Waimea, where English the explorer Capt. James Cook first landed in the islands. It’s still largely intact as a plantation town, thanks to the influence of the preservation-minded Fayé family, heirs to a former sugar plantation. With their charming Waimea Plantation Cottages (www.waimea-plantation.com), 60 renovated (or replicated) dwellings built between 1884 and about 1930, the family has shown that history is good business.

Nameplates on the cottages identify families that once lived in them. Relocated to a century-old coconut grove on a black-sand beach, the cottages have no air conditioning. Rather they offer ceiling fans, ocean breezes, claw-foot tubs, rattan furniture, and screen doors that bang shut. And colorful roosters strutting around the lush yards, making a nuisance of themselves at dawn. If you don’t want to use the kitchen, work your way through the menu of the microbrewery on the property.

Waimea is a convenient base from which to drive north to Waimea Canyon, which Mark Twain called the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific.” The 1,800-acre canyon park and lookout are 12 miles away at the end of a steep, winding road that traces the rim. The timeless orange-red canyon walls plunge 3,000 feet to the river that sculpted the panoramic view. The only distraction is overhead—the noisy flight of what some locals call the state bird, helicopters.

Adjacent to the canyon is 4,300-acre Koke’e State Park, which shouldn’t be missed by any hiker visiting Kauai. The views along its 19 trails vary from merely scenic to spectacular. Admission is free, including a small but engaging natural history museum (www.kokee.org), and there are very modest fees for campsites and much-in-demand cabins (808-335-6061). If you don’t mind roughing it in a historic bunk house (temporarily closed for renovation) built by the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, you can stay at the park free in exchange for helping conservationists clear out invasive flora that has been overwhelming native plants that grow nowhere else in the world (www.krcp.org).

For those who don’t care to hike, Aloha Kauai Tours offers a half-day, four-wheel-drive back-roads tour that unlocks the gates of a former plantation (www.alohakauaitours.com). The trip explores unforgettable countryside, including the valley where dinosaurs roamed in Jurassic Park. This is the historic Grove Farm, once owned by one of Queen Liliuokalani’s ardent American defenders, who didn’t go along with the coup that deposed the islands’ last monarch in 1895. Now the farm is part of the 49,000-acre holdings of Steve Case, the founder of America Online, a native of Kauai whose grandfather and father worked for the plantation.

On a recent trip the tour guide, “Uncle” Joe Breu, a retired policeman, drove through former cane fields now pasturing beef cattle. He stopped at the top of a hill, surrounded by grazing cows, some with egrets standing on their backs. Against a background of mountains covered in mist, a clump of trees with distinctive flat crowns stood in silhouette on a grassy ridge. Why did it seem as if we had magically strayed into Africa?

Those are albizia trees from Africa, Breu explained, the first of many alien species he would point out. From bamboo, sugar cane, and ti plants (for cooking and hula skirts, brought in by Polynesian settlers) to the pine trees brought by Captain Cook (for ship masts), much of what walks, flies, or is rooted in Kauai has come from somewhere else. Even plumeria, used for leis and one of the island’s signature horticultural plants, is an alien, from Mexico.

As we bounced along the dirt roads, blue-headed pheasants and a wild pig burst from roadside brush. Breu stopped at the rim of a small extinct volcano, whose inside slopes were covered with flowering bushes and small trees. To keep his visitors from falling 250 feet into the crater, he had erected a crude barrier of guava branches jammed into the earth. One of them, a descendant of guava plants brought in by Spaniards in the 1800s, had sprouted and was starting to bear fruit.

For an introduction to the mountainous center of the island, Aloha Kauai Tours also offers a rainforest outing that takes visitors to the foothills of 5,000-foot Mt. Waialeale, an extinct volcano and one of the wettest places in the world. It gets more than 400 inches of rain a year. The mountain is the fountainhead of the island’s seven rivers, including the only navigable river in the state.

After fording streams and passing through dense rain forest on a twisting, narrow road too rough for anyone with brittle bones, the tour van deposits passengers at a gateway left over from Jurassic Park. From there it’s a less than 1.5-mile hike to the end of the trail, which passes a nineteenth-century irrigation system, much of it chopped through miles of solid rock, with tunnels just large enough to crawl into. It is still in use.

The northern side of Kauai is the island’s least developed part and a must-see for anyone in search of Old Hawaii. On the way, you'll pass through Kapaa, a former pineapple cannery town and the largest community (about 10,000) on the island.

A walking tour, led by a volunteer from the Kauai Historical Society (www.kauaihistoricalsociety.org), puts flesh on the bones of Kauai’s story. During the early plantation era, for example, the Hee Fat building, named for the Chinese “rice king” who owned it, harbored an opium den. During World War II, when 40,000 troops were stationed on the island, Bob Hope entertained them in what is now the town’s ballpark. (The islanders of Japanese descent were never interned. They were simply too indispensable as schoolteachers, business owners, etc.)

Down the street is Larry’s Music, named for the late owner, who used to give piano lessons. If a student had no way to get to his shop, Larry drove to the pupil’s home with an upright piano in his pickup truck.

Then there's the Maytag Building, where the second-generation Maytag repairman is so lonely (since Sears came to the island and started eating his lunch) that he has taken up painting between service calls. Meanwhile latter-day hippies, reminiscent of the 1960s, when Elizabeth Taylor’s brother presided over a nearby commune, hang out in front of Java Kai, an Internet cafe in a former Chinese bank with foot-thick concrete walls. You can enjoy pure Hawaiian-grown coffee there, which is scarce on the mainland; what is sold as Kona coffee is usually a blend with less than 10 percent of its beans from the Big Island.

Behind the town, a blacktop path along the beach covers the old bed of a narrow-gauge railroad that once transported sugar cane and cane workers, some of whom took their final rides, in caskets, to a cemetery near the tracks a few miles out of town.

If you stroll along the beach, you are likely to see large outrigger canoes on the shore. Competitive canoeing is a growing sport and a sign of surging Hawaiian pride, for the islanders carry the DNA of ancient Polynesians, perhaps the finest open-boat navigators in history, who sailed by the stars and reputedly could confirm they were near land by tasting the sea.

From Kapaa to the end of the road, northbound drivers cross a series of one-lane bridges, literal as well as symbolic barriers to development that North Shore residents refuse to accept. When cars simultaneously arrive at a bridge from opposite directions, aggressive driving tends to separate the visitors from locals. For the natives, yielding is a sign not of meekness but of good manners.

Except perhaps at Princeville, a luxury resort and gated community, life in northern Kauai is generally very laid back and Old Hawaii. The residents are at least an hour from Lihue, which means that few tourists reach their Bali Hai, the dreamy hideaway of South Pacific, which was filmed here.

Some visitors pay $500 a night to stay in Princeville. But if your notion of comfortable lodging doesn’t require a half-acre lobby sheathed in marble, consider the small, more affordable Hanalei Colony Resort, an older but well-maintained condo complex on a secluded bay, with no phones or TVs in its rooms (www.hcr.com).

Here the north shore’s notorious surf pounds wildly enough to disturb sleep. Don’t resist it; get up when it’s still dark and go out barefoot on the lanai in time to catch the complete unfolding of a Maxfield Parrish sunrise. It’s as close as you can get to heaven and still have a pulse.