Hitchhiking Molokai

By: By Jamie Brisick | December 17, 2009 | Travel

Shortly after walking through a kind of serpentine enchanted forest, I arrived at Mana’E Good & Grinds, a small convenience store/drive-in along the coastal road. I ordered a chicken katsu plate lunch and sat down with it under a patch of trees. All was going well. The greasy, barbecue sauce-drenched chicken tasted splendid, until a primer-gray 4x4 with a big bloody dead pig draped across the rear bed parked not 20 feet away from me.

Hunting, I would soon discover, is huge on Molokai.

From there, I caught a lift into Halawa Valley, which is believed to be one of the earliest Polynesian settlements in Hawaii, dating back as early as 650 A.D. It is impossibly lush and Edenic, with the double-tiered, 250-foot Moolua Falls on one side and a cozy nook of white-sand beach on the other. The beach was nearly empty, save for a Hawaiian family playing a leisurely game of touch football at the shoreline.

Molokai is 38-eight miles long and 10 miles wide, with a population of about 8,000. With the exception of Niihau, it is the only island where Hawaiians are the majority. It also has the highest unemployment in all of Hawaii, but the locals I spoke to didn’t seem too worried about it.

“We’d much rather stop the mini-malls and the condos and 20,000-square-foot homes,” explained Kolohe, an effusive, born-and-bred Molokaian who gave me a lift back from Halawa Valley. “Preserving Molokai is far more important than bringing over jobs.”

Molokai’s fierce community activism could be glimpsed along the scenic stretch of Highway 450, where it seemed every tenth house was fronted by a protest sign. Most displayed a hand-painted, crossed-out windmill, in reference to the proposed wind farm on homestead land. One read, “Beware of missionaries dressed in green.” Another: “Look. No touch!”

There were also startling contrasts. One lily-white, well-kept home had a giant cross presiding over the garage. In the driveway was a minivan decorated with a similar cross on the hatch and the words, “1 cross, 3 nails, 4-given.” Directly across the street, a neglected house suggested Satan’s workshop. Rusted-out cars and discarded household appliances littered the overgrown front lawn. An Everlast heavy bag hung from a tree, surrounded by a circle of plastic lawn chairs, a 5-gallon Igloo beverage cooler and at least three barbecues. Next to it was a small pen full of pit bull pups, yelping away.

And I noticed something else: that it was exclusively locals who picked me up. The modest, sun-faded jalopies were on my team, but the shiny, spankin’ new rent-a-cars whizzed on by as if I were invisible.

***
That night was Aloha Friday at Hotel Molokai, and over a glass of Longboard Island Lager, I watched Na Kupuna, a band of a dozen or so “aunties,” sing smooth, lilting Hawaiian folk songs to the accompaniment of guitars and ukuleles. Often a hotel’s presentation of the indigenous music is watered down and mildly offensive, but this was the real deal. One stately senior citizen in a peach dress and fashionable cowboy hat couldn’t stop hula dancing in her seat.

Saturday morning started out well. I woke to a cacophony of crowing roosters and barking dogs, hit the Kamehameha V Highway at sunrise and got picked up almost immediately by the first car that passed. Three middle-aged men in a beater sedan were headed to the same place I was. We arrived together at Kanemitsu’s Bakery, a Molokai treasure that’s been in the same family for nine decades.

I ordered a buttery croissant and a cup of coffee, which I lapped up from a bench across the street and duly noted the Hawaiian’s strong affection for the jacked-up 4x4, often with “In Loving Memory Of…” stenciled across the tinted rear window. I saw a decked-out Honda CR-X, an early ’80s rust bucket of a Mercedes-Benz and heard Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” blaring from an iridescent blue/purple Toyota truck at 7 in the morning.

And then things took a turn for the worse. I was headed north, hoping to reach Kalaupapa Lookout in time to take a guided mule ride down to the renowned leper colony, when it suddenly occurred to me that not a single car had passed for more than 40 minutes. There were cars headed the opposite way, into town for the Saturday farmers market, doubtless, but my direction looked bleak. After two hours of standing on the side of the road, I realized that this was foolish; I was hitchhiking to spite myself. If I was headed to an unpopulated, tourist destination, and tourists didn’t pick up hitchhikers, then I was fighting a losing battle, swimming against the current as it were.

I crossed the street, pointed my thumb in the direction from whence I came and got picked up by the fifth car.

I rented a $49-a-day Toyota Echo from the affable agent at Hotel Molokai and made a beeline for the Kalaupapa Lookout (I’d long since missed my mule ride).

The view was spectacular. From a cutout in the thick forest of the Pala’au State Park, I gaped over the edge of a 1,500-foot cliff to the Kalaupapa Peninsula where the homes, structures and church of the former leper colony can be seen from a kind of bird’s-eye view. It is a curious piece of land. Not only was it created when lava erupted from the ocean floor, but it sticks out literally in the shape of a thumb and sits at the base of the world’s highest sea cliffs.

Kalaupapa is Molokai’s biggest tourist attraction, which is ironic considering that in the late 1800s, no one dared go near the place. I was hoping to see it up close, but there were signs forbidding “unaccompanied hikers” from making their way down the switchback trail. I did happen to meet the New Hope Paddle Team, a crew of eight vivacious female outrigger canoe paddlers, who were as entranced by the vista as I was.

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