Lanai

Lanai has the unusual distinction of being a place most people in Hawaii have never visited. It sits there in the channel between Maui and Molokai, visible from Lahaina on a clear day, close enough that you think you could swim to it. The ferry takes forty-five minutes and costs about as much as a decent dinner. Most people don’t bother. I’m glad I did.

The Garden of the Gods at Dawn

The official name is Keahiakawelo — the fire of Kawelo — and the Hawaiian legend attached to it involves a priest and a fire burning for so long it consumed the island’s vegetation and left this field of eroded rock. Standing in it at first light, I didn’t need the legend to understand why people reach for mythology here. The formations are terracotta and rust and bone-white, the light raking in from the east catches every edge, and the silence has a quality I can only describe as geological. Nothing moves. The wind doesn’t even reach this plateau the same way it does everywhere else.

I drove out on a rutted dirt track in a rented Jeep — the only way to reach the Garden — and arrived as the sky went from dark blue to violet to the particular orange that makes everything else look like a stage set. I was completely alone for forty minutes. Then another Jeep arrived. I left.

Hulopoe Bay’s Improbable Clarity

The snorkeling at Hulopoe Bay is some of the best I’ve found anywhere in the Pacific, and I’ve had plenty of time to compare. The water clarity reads almost like a problem — you keep expecting the bottom to be closer than it is, misjudging depth by three or four meters. The reef along the bay’s left edge holds octopuses in the crevices and spinner dolphins that occasionally come in from open water and make everyone in the bay stop swimming and just watch.

There’s a camping area above the beach and a Four Seasons resort at the bay’s edge, which creates a quietly surreal coexistence. I was staying in a vacation rental in Lanai City, spending my mornings at the bay with people who’d paid several thousand dollars a night for essentially the same view of the water.

Lanai City’s Tin Roofs and One Coffee Shop

The entire “city” is eight hundred people, a plantation-era grid of streets with Norfolk pines planted down the center, and a main square flanked by wooden storefronts painted in faded colors. There is one coffee shop. There is a general store. There’s a place called Blue Ginger Cafe where I ate eggs and Portuguese sausage for three mornings in a row and where the woman at the counter remembered my order by the second day.

The pace is not affected. It’s structural. There’s simply nowhere to rush to.

The Munro Trail and the Channel View

The Munro Trail runs the ridge of Lanaihale, the island’s highest point, through Cook pines planted by naturalist George Munro in the 1900s to catch moisture and create water. On a clear day — and it’s often not clear, cloud hangs on the ridge — you can see five Hawaiian islands from the summit. I caught Maui, Molokai, and the Big Island through gaps in the mist, each one looking smaller and further away than I expected.

When to go: May through September brings the clearest skies and calmest ocean for the Hulopoe Bay snorkeling. The Garden of the Gods is worth visiting in any season — the low winter light in December and January can be spectacular — but you’ll want dry roads to reach it, so avoid visiting immediately after heavy rain.