by Paul Theroux
It is true that Molokai attracts few visitors. Of the millions of tourists who come to Hawaii each year, fewer than 100,000 visit Molokai. In Hawaiian terms Molokai is the poor relation, with a reputation for clannishness, local feuding, and xenophobia. In the distant past it was known as a place of refuge and tradition. Lozenge-shaped, only thirty-eight miles long and ten wide, it is an isolated place. Isolation breeds suspicion, even paranoia. But the positive result of isolation is that old ways are kept, the culture is maintained, and families become extended and interlinked. Molokai, once famous for its sorcerers, is still noted for its mana, spiritual power.
There are about seven thousand people on the island. About a hundred of them are lepers, living in the almost inaccessible Kalaupapa Peninsula. Molokai has a grim history of being the dumping ground of lepers in the nineteenth century. Father Damien de Veuster came from Belgium to tend them, and his effort in organizing the leprosarium of Kalaupapa put Molokai on the map and made him a candidate for sainthood. Jack London wrote about Kalaupapa. Robert Louis Stevenson, who briefly lived in Hawaii, also wrote of the island, an eloquent defense of Father Damien, in his open letter to the odious Reverend Hyde.
On Molokai's north coast, sea cliffs extend from Halawa Valley, on the eastern tip of the island, to Moomomi Bay in the west. The cliffs are a gothic wall, as soaring and complex as a green cathedral. The Na Pali coast of the island of Kauai is praised, and so are the high islands of the Marquesas, the smoldering volcanoes of Vanuatu, and the glorious mossy and ferny cones of Tahiti and Moorea. But nothing can compare with these thirty miles of green cliffs—the highest, the most beautiful I have seen in Oceania.
The question is how to see them.
"Be very careful," I was told by the resident of nineteen years. "They call this the Friendly Isle. But don't be fooled. It's not friendly. It was never friendly."
Yet which island in the world is friendly? The configuration of an island landscape is fortresslike; indeed, the high volcanic islands of the Pacific actually look like medieval castles. In order to survive, islanders have an innate suspicion of outsiders. They have the intuitive skills of seamen, and they need them, for if the volcanic islands appear castellated, then the low coral atolls are like ships, and their inhabitants are like sailors. "Friendly" is just a tourist-industry sobriquet. In my experience, the friendliest people on Pacific islands are those who have the greatest assurance that you are going to leave soon.
The high winds and heavy seas continued. Even on the south shore, an irregular sea of vicious waves stretched all the way to Maui on the east and Lanai on the south. I had planned a solitary trip along the north coast, from Halawa to Kalaupapa, but this was not paddling weather. Kept on shore, I found myself falling into conversations with local people. Some of them frankly and cheerfully warned me that if I camped anywhere near Halawa my gear would be stolen. Another man told me of the aggressiveness of local boys. It was mostly bad news.
Near Honouliwai Bay, on the south shore, I met a young woman named Puna (it means "spring," in the sense of water). She was about twenty, of mixed Hawaiian and Portuguese heritage.
She said, "I could not live anywhere but Molokai. It is lovely and quiet. I hate Honolulu."
"Have you been to the mainland?"
"To New Mexico," she said, and laughed. "People spoke to me in Spanish—they thought I was a Mexican!"
My backup plan was to camp at Honouliwai Bay. In many ways this little bay illustrates the strange fate of Molokai. Once it was the site of traditional fish ponds and taro growing. (Taro root is pounded into pasty poi and eaten with fish and fruit.) But hardly any taro grows in the valley now, and the fishing is poor, the fish stocks depleted. The valley stream is clogged in places with a runoff of silt from the hills, which have been overgrazed by cattle or nibbled by wild goats. Worst of all was this sign near where I was going to camp: "Warning: Leptospirosis Health Hazard—Fresh Water Stream and Mud Possibly Polluted with Bacteria—Swim at Your Own Risk."
More bad news: leptospirosis (a problem in some European streams) is spread by rat urine. And on the eastern, rocky end of the island many fences had been put up by private ranches. My impression of Molokai so far was of an island of restrictions and barriers: warnings and No Trespassing signs and whispered suspicions and fences.
But the ocean is free, is it not? Making an island to the east my objective, I set up my kayak and paddled into the wind. The humpbacked island, called Moku Ho'oniki, is a bare black cinder cone from Hawaii's period of volcanism—in effect, the birth of the islands. "Written permission must be given before anyone can land on the island," I had read in my guidebook. It had been designated a seabird sanctuary. But I was not planning to land, only to paddle around it.
The ferocity of the wind and waves here made me wary of attempting a north coast trip. Yet, as with all kayaking in the Pacific, I gained a new perspective of Molokai itself. It was one of the emptiest islands I had seen, a place of great scarred bluffs and volcanic ridges that lay below the rugged heights of Molokai's highest peak, Kamakou (4,961 feet). Ancient ruins were visible from offshore: altars, abandoned house platforms made of black boulders, and the sacred places called heiau. Enormous rock formations dwarfed the sparse stands of trees, and although there were coconut palms and mangroves at the shoreline, the tiny houses were hidden, giving an impression of an island without people, rather ghostly and stark, its mana almost visible.
I did not make it to Ho'oniki—the sea was just too rough. After I came ashore, I looked for a camping place. I had not sought permission in advance—my idea was to use a secluded stretch of beach, under the palms. I found nothing but Keep Out signs and angry guard dogs and more fences. The place had been designed to repel any casual visitor. Campers were not wanted, and so I found an inexpensive hotel and stayed there, making forays to Halawa Valley to contemplate the wind and waves.
"It's the wrong time of year," a surfer named Harry told me. He was watching the waves breaking from the sandy beach at the Halawa's shore. "This is pretty bad even for surfing—all that wind is awful."
Junk waves—no good for surfing—slapped into the bay. Beyond them was a rough sea, torn by the strong northeast wind.
There were other ways of seeing the lovely sea cliffs of the north coast. If I could not paddle, I would hike over the top and down to the Kalaupapa Peninsula.
More permission was needed—written permission from an official of Kalawao County. Amazing! Here, on one of the emptiest and least-visited islands I had ever seen, it seemed impossible to roam freely. Molokai welcomed short-timers, day trippers, golfers—people who would obey regulations. Since I had come to the Pacific to get away from regulations, this was obviously a problem.
Yet the contradiction interested me. The island's xenophobia and maddening restrictions had kept it underdeveloped. There was no traffic, no stop lights, no big buildings. A little paradise, you might say—wonderful, yet a paradise in which you are not really welcome. If people came in large numbers, it would cease to be what it is. Molokai is the only Hawaiian island that is less prosperous than it was twenty years ago, where employment and income are on the decline. That would be fine if there were a traditional lifestyle of fishing and agriculture, but that is not the case. Many of those people flying the Hawaiian flag and living in charming huts and sitting under the palm trees are welfare recipients who buy their fish and poi in the supermarket.
Nowhere on the island is the sense of isolation more profound than on the Kalaupapa Peninsula, the old leper settlement, where I hoped to paddle. Small planes can land on the airstrip, but the usual way people visit is on horseback, down a two-and-a-half-mile trail that zigzags from the top of the cliff down to sea level. Only organized tours are allowed. Although the beach at the foot of the cliff is spectacular, swimming is not permitted. In the early nineteenth century, when lepers were dumped here, it was like a prison camp, noted for death and suffering. An extreme example of Molokai itself, perhaps—a refuge, a place apart
. And so it has remained, isolated and beautiful.
Rejecting the horseback ride, I secured written permission to hike to the bottom of the cliff. The county official warned me that I was not allowed to camp, not allowed to use the beach, not allowed to enter even the outskirts of the leper settlement. And he closed by saying, "The hiking trail is very strenuous and steep. If I were you, I would not do it."
Determined to defy him, I set off early, before the party of horseback riders started out. The official had not exaggerated: the trail was more difficult than I had imagined, but it was also vastly more beautiful. Though the horses' hooves had worn a deep groove in it, the trail had been carefully secured against erosion by boulders and steps. In the cool sparkling morning, with some birds twittering and long-tailed tropicbirds making their harsh cry, with the brilliant green cliffs towering over the furious sea, scored blue and white like a world of marble, I made the hour-and-a-half descent down the miles of staircase to the foot of the Kukuiohapu'u cliffs.
I walked to the edge of the Kalaupapa settlement and peered at it: small neat houses, a church, a dispensary, many graveyards. It was a tiny village surrounded by gravestones.
A pickup truck drove toward me, a woman at the wheel. She said, "Are you looking for the bus?"
She said that I was not allowed to walk around the settlement, but that a bus was waiting for the horse riders. She offered to take me to it.
"I married a patient," she said, explaining how it was that such a healthy sixty-year-old happened to be driving a truck around a leper colony on this lovely morning.
"What's it like living here?"
She laughed out loud. "It's different!"
That was all she said, but it was enough: the simple word was full of meaning.
The tour was led by Henry Nalaielua. He told us about the history of the place, the effort of Father Damien, of Sister Marianne, of Brother Dutton, who, speaking of good intentions, said significantly, "It is the same one place as another. One's Molokai can be anywhere." We saw the original settlement, which dated from 1866. The memorials. St. Philomena's Church. The sacred groves of the old Hawaiian villages. In the past, the prevailing mood of Kalaupapa had been "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," and one of the Hawaiian sayings was, "In Kalaupapa there is no justice."
Henry said all this with a smile. He was a pleasant man with a kindly manner. He was also a leper. After being diagnosed with Hansen's disease, he had been sent from the Hamakua coast of the Big Island to Kalaupapa in 1941, at the age of fifteen. Except for ten years in a leprosarium in Louisiana (the only one on the mainland), he had spent his whole time here.
"When I came here, it was a place of many deaths. People were dying before I could say my last name. There were three deaths the day I arrived. It was a place of suffering, and the people here had memories of great suffering. I myself have suffered—the nerves in my body so painful that I couldn't sleep. See the graves over there, and there. Thousands of them."
Beyond the toppling graves, the memorial to Damien, and the wooden houses of Kalaupapa were the vertiginous heights of sea cliffs, the rounded and fluted folds of their walls, the deep, dark green recesses of the valleys. I stood on aching legs and sore feet, bewitched by these soaring cliffs and the mists of the wave-pounded shores.
This forbidden place of lepers and illness and abandonment had become, because of its very isolation, a place of magic. That is probably the way of the world: a place is preserved as wilderness because it is inaccessible—too far, too hidden, too maddening to visit, with a rocky coast buffeted by wild weather. It is also the conundrum of Molokai, beautiful and impossible.
Connected in Palau
AS SOMEONE who prides himself on traveling light, it seemed awkward to be flying across the Pacific, to an uninhabited island in the Republic of Palau, with five bags, seriously overweight.
"What's in these?" the customs inspector demanded at Won Pat International Airport in Guam, where I was spending the night.
The smallest bag held my clothes (not many; Palau is warm). Another held camping equipment (tent, sleeping bag, lamp, stove, mask, snorkel, fins), and two were filled with electronic devices (night-vision goggles, a camcorder, a Newton message pad, and so forth). The heaviest bag contained a fifty-pound Navcom satellite phone, with its own power supply (a Ni-Cad battery slab) and built-in antenna dish—a "secure uplink," Steven Seagal called this phone in Under Siege, although his was an older, heavier model.
"A satellite telephone, a computer, a CD player—"
Bored by my power-user litany, the customs man interrupted me. "You got fruit?"
"No fruit."
"Pass."
I had with regret left another portable phone, an Alden Satphone, in Honolulu. It was a user-friendly device, very light and affordable, with fax capability, but I had not been able to solve the power-supply problem (a car battery as additional hand luggage). And beyond Agana, Guam (specifically Wet Willie's Bar in Tumon Bay, where they were conversation pieces), my pager and Virtual Vision TV goggles were no use. Heavily laden, a tech-weenie traveler, I was headed for Koror.
There I intended to hire a boat to take me to the small Ngemelis group, at the western edge of the reef of the Rock Islands. My chosen island was nameless, but when I say that its position was Lat. 7°07′25.1″ N, Long. 134°14′24.7″ E, it will be obvious that I also had with me a Trimbal global positioning system. The idea was that I would set up camp on this desert island and, in spite of my remoteness, be in touch and well connected. "Hold on, Mrs. Crusoe, your son Robinson is on the line..."
Palau, so far away, so pretty, seemed the perfect place to test communications equipment. In the Caroline Islands, in the western Pacific, just north of New Guinea and east of the Philippines, Palau is one of the last great island wildernesses of the world, another constellation of islands in the galaxy known as Micronesia. From Honolulu, it is a seven-and-a-half-hour flight west to Guam, a large ruined island of fast-food outlets, shopping malls, and bungaloid subdivisions. And then a two-hour flight southwest to the main island of Babeldaop and the town of Koror, which is the capital of Palau (Belau in its revised spelling).
I arrived and set up camp under the palms of deserted Omekang, one of the many Rock Islands. In the middle of the night, I crawled out of my tent and was uplifted. I had never felt such serenity in the open air. I had the strong impression of the physical world as a peaceful room. Perhaps because it was midnight, and I had just woken up, the specific image that came to me was an enormous bedroom. The night was dead still, and the full moon lighted the beach with a glow that was lovelier for its mild fluorescence. In the mass of bright stars the Southern Cross was distinct. I stood stark naked and marveled at my luck.
There was no wind, not the slightest movement of air. The temperature was about eighty, or a bit more. There was complete silence: the birds were asleep, the insects were still. The sea was flat—not only no waves, but no sound of water lapping at the shoreline. No flies buzzed. And—this still amazes me—no mosquitoes.
Palau has its hazards: sea snakes, stinging jellyfish, venomous cone shells, poisonous lionfish, crown-of-thorns starfish, stonefish, fire coral, crocodiles (C. porosus, the saltwater croc), sea urchins, sharks. There are drunks and bad drivers, too. There are harmless but sinister-looking creatures of which fruit bats and spotted eagle rays and huge eels are just three. Yet with certain precautions, it is possible to live more or less unscathed in this archipelago.
Bringing electronic equipment to a tropical island is another story, however. This stuff was expensive, and all of it was on loan. I worried constantly about the dampness, which ranged from Micronesian moisture to torrential downpours. I kept every item in a plastic bag; many of them I double- and triple-bagged, fearful of sand penetrating and fouling them. I watched most of Top Gun on my Sony camcorder. I kept my MPR Satfind 406 emergency rescue device near at hand. (Essential on a desert island, but I did not use it. You switch it on, it emits a signal, and they find
you.)
I began making notes about this on my Newton message pad, but as soon as I wrote them down, they were turned into gibberish. Or was it? I wrote "Paul." It printed "tense." I wrote "This trip." It translated "the test." It seemed to be a sort of sibylline oracle that changed scribbles into gnomic utterances. Then the Newton complained of low memory, and hefting it in my hand was like holding an expensive, rather moronic, temperamental paving stone. I stowed it with the Virtual Vision goggles and the pager, and after that kept my diary in a small notebook with a ballpoint pen.
My Palauan friend Benna took me farther west in his boat, to the edge of the Rock Islands, and as this was the typhoon season, Michael Gilbeaux, from Athens, Georgia, came along to help me. Michael, who is twenty-five, runs the Sea Turtle Research and Conservation Project in Palau, which is basically a running battle with turtle poachers. Most of the Rock Islands—several hundred of them, great and small—are themselves turtle-shaped, of low and humpy limestone. They are the pitted remains of coral reefs thrust out of the sea long ago by the forces of undersea volcanoes.
Covered with pandanus and palms, the Rock Islands are known in the local language as Ellebacheb, which is also a synonym for small, uninhabited islands of rocks and trees. They are very green, rounded, all sizes, from small lumps in the ocean to long rounded ridges. Their sides are vertical and unclimbable. Some have white sand beaches. Birds nest in their hollows. One of the pleasures of paddling here is being able to listen to the sounds of birds: swifts, finches, swallows, the Palau fruit dove, the black Nicobar pigeon, the screech of the greater sulphur-crested cockatoo, the white-tailed tropicbird that swoops and glides and makes a clicking chatter among the heights of the islands and never seems to come to rest. Benna dropped Michael and me, with my bags and electronic equipment and some water and a sea kayak, on the beach of a tiny island in the Ngemelis cluster. This was at dusk. After we unloaded, one of Benna's crewmen stood in the bow, grunted, and threw his arms apart in a gesture of crucifixion.
