Hitchhiking Molokai

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

“There’s something else you should check out,” said one blonde paddler with a tattooed shoulder.

I followed them through a tunnel of trees to Kauleonanahoa, also known as “the phallic rock.” It needs no explanation, other than the fact that it’s about the size of a VW bug and that according to legend, if a woman visits with offerings and then spends the night, she’ll return home pregnant. I should also mention that the paddlers took turns posing for pictures, turning the rock into a sort of trophy horse.

I then headed west to Papohaku Beach, a 3-mile stretch that’s billed as the longest and most pristine in all Hawaii. From the car it looked idyllic: calm turquoise water, virgin white sand and not a single person in sight. But the moment I opened the door, I understood why. The wind was whipping at full gale, the sand like pins and needles against my legs.

I drove through the old plantation village of Maunaloa, built in the ’20s to service the Dole Pineapple Company. Dole left Molokai in the ’70s, and the town has a desolate, abandoned feel. The Town Cinemas, Molokai’s only movie theater, was boarded up, as was the Molokai Ranch, KFC and Libby’s Drive In. But Big Wind Kite Factory was open, and Jonathan Socher, the white-bearded proprietor, was gregarious and hospitable.

He told me that “kite is good therapy” and that one of his greatest pleasures is taking stressed-out businessmen kite flying and watching “the tension in the string release the tension in their body.”

I told him I’d been to Halawa Valley and Kalaupapa Lookout and asked what else I needed to see or do on Molokai. He told me to relax.

“Not only is there nothing on Molokai,” he quipped, “but there’s huge amounts of it.”

That night, I had dinner at Kualapuu Cookhouse, an old plantation house turned casual, Hawaiiana-themed eatery. The menu was distinctly Molokaian: “If you’re in a hurry,” it read at the bottom of a list of fish and meat dishes, “you’re on the wrong island.” I asked my grinning waiter what he recommended, and he said that the hamburger steak was a favorite. It was tasty. It was also the biggest plate of food I’ve eaten in the last decade: two ginormous patties covered in mushrooms and onions slathered in rich gravy, two scoops of sticky white rice and a mountain of macaroni salad. It recalled the old saying, “Hawaiians don’t eat till they’re full; they eat till they’re tired.”

On Sunday morning, I returned to my hitchhiking. In less than five minutes of standing on the side of the Kamehameha V Highway, I caught a lift with a young mom and her cherubic son in a beater pick up. I rode in the back alongside several bags of recycled newspaper. The sun was balmy, and the wind smelled of the sea and plumeria flowers.

We passed One Alii Beach Park, where an extended family was gathered around a picnic table under palm trees. We passed a black-sand beach where a large tattooed man frolicked in the shorebreak with a small child on his shoulders. Most memorably, we passed a half-mile-long strip called “Church Row” that included a Congregational Church, Church of God, Sacred House of New Jerusalem, Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Church of the Nazarene, Calvary Chapel and Seventh-day Adventist Church. Butted so close together as they were, I was reminded of a food court in a shopping mall.

Molokai is fascinating in its simplistic, unhurried way. There are moments when it looks and feels like The Land of the Lost — completely cut off from the high-tech, celebrity-obsessed, dollar-driven mainland. And then there are other moments — specifically at Molokai Pizza Café where the tables are filled with bucket-sized Cokes, X-large pizzas, and XX-large people — when it could just as easily be the Midwest, albeit with darker skin. Most of all, it’s great to know there are still places in the world where you can stick out your thumb and catch a lift.

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