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May 14, 2006
Mark Twain's Hawaii
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
LIKE any paradise, Hawaii walks the fine line between blissful and boring. David Lodge noted this in his satirical novel "Paradise News," imagining the predicament of tourists in fanny packs walking up and down the sidewalks of Waikiki like heavenly pilgrims with no place left to go. They seem contented, but a half-formed question lingers in their eyes: "Well, this is nice, but is this all there is? Is this it?"
Actually, it's not. Hawaii's blandly sunny face hides a turbulent history, an extra dimension of sadness and beauty. This is what separates Hawaii from the beach-and-beer nowheres like Fort Lauderdale and Cancún: a complicated soul.
Finding it means getting out of Waikiki, peeling back layers to uncover the stories behind the scenery. It means having the right guide, a writer to annotate the loveliness.
Hawaii has seen its share of famous storytellers. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and Herman Melville passed through on their way to other frontiers. But what little they wrote about Hawaii was fictionalized, heavily metaphorical and is now mostly forgotten. James Michener, on the other hand, wrote way too much: His 1959 novel "Hawaii" covers nearly the whole thing, from the volcanoes to the missionaries, a span of 40 million years, or maybe pages, it's hard to tell. ("And then one day," one typically fizzy passage goes, "at the northwest end of the subocean rupture, an eruption of liquid rock occurred that was different from any others.")
That book is a brick, and so is the movie, even if it does have Julie Andrews, that pearly shell, playing a missionary's wife. Neither is what you want if you're looking for something to enrich your visit.
What you want is Mark Twain.
Twain spent four months in the islands in 1866, when he was 31 and working on becoming famous. His 25 letters from the Sandwich Islands, written on assignment for The Sacramento Union, are still fresh and rudely funny after almost a century and a half — a foretaste of genius and the best travel writing about Hawaii, my home state, I have ever read.
Twain's Hawaii teemed with ship captains, whalers, missionaries, mosquitoes, fragrant thickets of flowers and thousands of cats. France, Britain and the United States were competing for influence, making the usual colonial mischief. The population and ancient ways of native Hawaiians, the Kanaka Maoli, were in catastrophic decline, beset by disease and cultural pressures. But Hawaii was still in its sovereign glory, with an elected legislature and a 35-year-old king: stately, plump Kamehameha V, the last of his family dynasty. It was a land of royal pageantry, tropical splendor and a fair amount of squalor.
Determined to "ransack the islands" for his dispatches, Twain rented a horse and rode until he was laid up with saddle sores. He rode by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones, the remains of an ancient battlefield. He scaled the summit of Kilauea during an eruption, standing at the crater's edge on a foggy night, his face made crimson by lava-glow. He hiked through misty valleys. He surfed.
You heard right, Huck: America's greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, "for a particularly prodigious billow to come along," upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.
"None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly," he wrote.
He also tried swimming with nude native women, but when he got into the surf, they got out.
He might have tasted poi, eaten with the fingers in those days from a communal calabash, but after reading this passage, I suspect not: "Many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the virtues of its contents. One tall gentleman, with nothing in the world on but a soiled and greasy shirt, thrust in his finger and tested the poi, shook his head, scratched it with the useful finger, made another test, prospected among his hair, caught something and ate it; tested the poi again, wiped the grimy perspiration from his brow with the universal hand, tested again, blew his nose — 'Let's move on, Brown,' said I, and we moved."
That passage is from "Mark Twain's Letters From Hawaii," which along with "Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands," is the starting point for tracing Twain's footsteps. The trail begins in downtown Honolulu:
"A good part of Honolulu turned out to welcome the steamer," Twain wrote. "It was Sunday morning, and about church time, and we steamed through the narrow channel to the music of six different church bells, which sent their mellow tones far and wide, over hills and valleys, which were peopled by naked, savage, thundering barbarians only 50 years ago!"
In this passage and others, readers should try to forgive Twain's culture-bound ethnic insensitivity and remember that his misanthropy is refreshingly all-inclusive. He also betrays a sympathy for Hawaiians that is pretty enlightened for a white guy from 19th-century Missouri.
Downtown Honolulu is far less savage than it was, but architectural traces of the kingdom survive among the groves of mirrored office towers. The grandest is Iolani Palace, a Victorian dollhouse of fluted columns and wrought iron that is the only royal residence in the United States, not counting Graceland.
Twain never saw it — it went up in 1882 — but on the palace lawn, now shaded by an immense kapok tree, he watched 2,000 Hawaiians grieving by torchlight for Princess Victoria Kamamalu, the king's sister, on the eve of her funeral.
"Every night, and all night long, for more than 30 days," he wrote, "multitudes of these strange mourners have burned their candle-nut torches in the royal inclosure, and sung their funeral dirges, and danced their hulahulas, and wailed their harrowing wail for the dead."
All you hear now is the droning of cars; the palace is in Honolulu's business district, next to the state Capitol. For a more haunting experience, go up the road into Nuuanu Valley, to the princess's burial place. On the day of her funeral, Twain galloped there to await the procession.
The Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii consists of several crypts and a coral-block chapel on a lawn lined with palms. It may be the most history-drenched place in the islands. The mausoleum's curator, or kahu, is William Kaiheekai Maioho, who lives in a cottage on the grounds and is the sixth in his family to hold the position. Answering my knock on a recent visit, he offered to show me the chapel. He opened its windows to the sun and sat in a pew to tell the story.
Speaking gently, he recited a long history of royal funerals and renovations, then took me to the family crypt of the Kalakauas, successors to the Kamehamehas. The gold inscriptions on its white marble walls are as familiar to Hawaii schoolchildren as those of presidents: Kalakaua, Kapiolani, Kaiulani, Kalanianaole and Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch.
Visiting their graves made me eager to plunge deeper into Hawaii's royal past, following Twain's footsteps to the Big Island, where Kamehameha the Great was born and where an eruption of Kilauea that began in 1983 is still sending lava down gentle slopes into the boiling sea.
Twain spent weeks covering the Big Island on horseback, but a rental car makes it possible to hit the highlights in two days or three. The highway to Kilauea's summit is a straight, slow climb out of Hilo, past tin-roofed frame houses in tidy yards planted with ti, banana and torch ginger, and a more recent development: gridlocked shopping-mall sprawl. That side of the island also has an end-of-the-road, Alaska feel, with lots of blond dreadlocks and holistic massage salons. One Adopt-a-Highway sponsor is the Raelians, the sect that promotes human cloning and believes the first humans were created by visiting space aliens.
If so, the upper slopes of Kilauea are a likely landing area. The lush, broad-leafed lowlands give way to scrubby ohia trees poking out of an understory thick with ginger and uluhe ferns. Soon you are in the chill and splendid desolation of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. At the visitor center, rangers give daily briefings on the air quality — the sulfurous fumes can be thick and dangerous — and the state of the lava flow.
Perched at the rim of the steaming caldera is the old Volcano House hotel. Twain stayed here, but when it was a primitive hostel, not this imposing structure with a large fireplace in a lobby lined with portraits of Hawaii's kings and queens.
The Volcano House has crater-view rooms at $225 a night, but if you want an experience closer to Twain's, stay in one of the hotel's tidy wooden cabins in the Namakani Paio campground, three miles away in a grove of towering koa, ohia and eucalyptus trees. They cost $50 a night and sleep four, with separate bathrooms and hot showers, and are a perfect base for a Twain-style expedition to the eruption.
For the last 23 years, the lava has been flowing not from Kilauea's summit but from Pu'u O'o vent, a crack in its southern slopes. The lava has buried miles of mountainside — as well as streets, subdivisions and beaches — in crunchy black lacquer. Chain of Craters Road winds down the mountain like a lazily draped ribbon on a pillow. Roadcuts through old lava flows are marked with dates, and even those from the 1950's are still desolate — just craggy, brownish-black rock, like strewn coffee grounds.
Night falls like an anvil in these latitudes. The flowing lava is invisible by day, but at night it becomes a shimmering strip of orange, running up the mountainside and coloring the clouds above. A steam plume rises at the ocean's edge. Tourists who wisely take walking sticks, boots and flashlights can clamber up to where the lava has overrun the road, for a long hike over cool lava to get closer to the glowing rock and steam.
BUT you can also stay put, since the view from the road — especially through the rangers' telescope — is excellent. It is a staggering sight, though not, sadly, as spectacular as the bubbling lava lake Twain lucked upon:
"The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!"
A long drive out of Volcanoes National Park winds down around the United States' southernmost point, then up the coast to Kailua-Kona. In Waiohinu, a roadside marker points out Mark Twain's monkeypod tree, planted by the man himself.
For a surreal plunge into deep history, visit Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park, commonly called the City of Refuge, a centuries-old religious sanctuary. Twain marveled at its hulking stonework, which was built in the 1500's without mortar and stands to this day just as he described it, above tidal pools full of foraging sea turtles.
It's a short drive from there to Kealakekua Bay, where native Hawaiians brought Captain James Cook's celebrated career to a sudden halt. "Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide," wrote Twain, ever the provocative American. "Wherever he went among the islands he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment."
If you head from there to Kailua Kona, the Big Island's main tourist enclave, you may conclude that Cook's defeat was only a temporary setback. Twain described it as "the sleepiest, quietest, Sundayest looking place you can imagine." But today the main drag, Alii Drive, is a tacky cousin to Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, a ruthlessly efficient operation for the concentration and extraction of tourist money.
It looks like a highly unlikely place for Hawaiian authenticity, but there it is at King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Hotel, the city's main hotel for locals — the one that caters to a mom-and-pop, wedding and luau crowd. Its 70's décor is pleasing, but even more so are the lobby and hall exhibits of old Hawaiian art and artifacts. It is a museum doubling as hotel, complete with portraits of royalty and a wooden bust of King Kamehameha I himself over the front desk.
The dinner buffet is a paradise of Hawaiian food: poi, kalua pig, rice and poke, a traditional dish of marinated raw fish. At the poolside bar the night I was there, a table of local guys in tank tops and sunglasses downed pitchers of beer and played ukuleles. I listened while floating on my back in the pool, staring up at Orion in the inky sky and thinking: it doesn't get much more Hawaiian than this.
But it does: There is a restored Hawaiian temple, or heiau, on the grounds. You can walk there after dark, as I did, following a row of gas torches to the water's edge, a grass hut and a lava-rock platform. The platform, a marker says, is the very one used by William Maioho's distant ancestor to prepare Kamehameha I for burial. Twain, quoting from an 1844 history volume, gives a detailed account of the events surrounding Kamehameha's death, which prompted, among other things, the sacrifice of 300 dogs "in lieu of human victims."
On a lawn beyond the platform an outdoor reception was breaking up. Musicians were packing up instruments, lingerers were chatting, the dark waters were rippling in the orange glow of torch light. There was a table with a guest book and photo album — this had been a baby luau, celebrating a child's first birthday. It was about as old and genuine as Hawaiian traditions get.
There's depth for you — two true stories of the real Hawaii, one nearly lost to time, the other just beginning, and both hidden in plain sight among the tiki torches of a tourist ground zero. Twain would have appreciated it.
WHAT TO DO
The Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii (2261 Nu'uanu Avenue in Honolulu; 808-587-2590) is free, though closed on weekends. To enter the chapel or view the Kalakaua crypt, ask the curator, William Maioho. The little house is his; just knock.
Iolani Palace (364 South King Street, Honolulu; 808-522-0822; www.iolanipalace.org) has a "grand" ($20) and a self-guided ($6) tour of the gallery. The shady grounds are a popular picnic spot, especially during free concerts by the Royal Hawaiian Band, most Fridays from noon to 1.
Many of the Mark Twain stops on the Big Island of Hawaii are on Highway 11, which connects Kona and Hilo. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (www.nps.gov/havo) is 96 miles from Kona, 30 from Hilo, and open all hours, all year. Best lava viewing has been at night from the end of Chain of Craters Road, which descends 3,700 feet to ocean. Leave three or four hours and take water. Check with the park for latest lava activity.
Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park (808-328-2326), is on Route 160 (off Highway 11, turn toward the ocean at Honaunau Post Office). Kealakekua Bay is five miles north on Route 160.
LAWRENCE DOWNES is an editorial writer for The Times.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company