Posted on: Sunday, September 8, 2002
TRAVEL
Explore scenic and historic North Kohala
• If you go to North Kohala...
• Hike through history at Pololu Valley
• Map of North Kohala
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Travel Editor
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| The bay at Keokea Beach Park, between Hawi and the Pololu Lookout, is among several small parks along the North Kohala Coast where you can picnic, swim or snorkel. However, check on ocean conditions and pay attention to signs.
Carl E. "Sonny" Koonce III • Special to The Advertiser |
HAWI, Big Island — It is an irony that strikes Rob Pacheco anew every day: There are fewer people and animals, and less economic enterprise, in North Kohala today than 100 years ago.
"It's really unusual," said Pacheco as he led my husband and me on a bumpy four-wheel-drive tour of a grazing lands that were cane fields 25 years ago. "Most places are more built up, but not here."
On the plus side, all this abandoned landscape makes the area of more interest to visitors than it might have been when cane trucks clogged the winding roads.
North Kohala — the length of Highway 270, roughly 25 miles from Kawaihae in the south to the end of the road past Kapa'au at Pololu Valley lookout —Êis dripping with history. It is also graced today with a number of really cool shops (the kind in which you actually find something you've never seen anywhere else), the largest used-book store in the Islands and eateries worth driving for.
Pacheco, who runs a company that offers nature adventures, finds evidence of the multilayered history of North Kohala every time he breaks a new trail or clears an old one, hacks his way through a guava and ginger forest or explores a mountain stream, walks the pasturelands overlooking the blue Pacific or pokes into a mountain tunnel. He and his wife, Cindy, and their 25 employees have developed a number of attractions that take advantage of the trails once used by irrigation workers and muleskinners.
As we hike a path originally built by workers on the Kohala Ditch irrigation project, Pacheco points to the floor of Pololu Valley 1,000 feet below us, once a thriving taro- and rice-growing community, now gone. In fact, the last mile or two of road before the Pololu lookout is off the power grid entirely — the few homes rely on solar or generator electricity, including the home of falsetto legend Clyde "Kindy" Sproat, the very last place on the road. His family has long lived in the area.
The decaying mule station from which some of Pacheco's excursions depart was once the starting point for daily mule trains carrying diesel fuel to power a water pumping station a couple of valleys away; this went on right up to the 1960s, which is why Pacheco was lucky enough to find a few people still around who knew their way around a mule when he started leading mule treks for visitors. By the time Pacheco began using the mule station, it had become a stash-and-crash spot for pig hunters.
Even if you're staying in Kona or along South Kohala's resort coast, you can "do" North Kohala in a single long day. Experience a half-day nature adventure, such as one of Pacheco's hikes, and still have time for an ultra-'ono lunch at Bamboo Cafe, poking through art galleries and gift stores in Hawi and Kapa'au and even a few minutes at one of the parks or historic sites along the way.Among other adventures, Flumin' da Ditch (kayaking in the famous Kohala Ditch) and HMV Tours ("Hummer safaris") are popular, there are all-terrain-vehicle trips and archery outings as well as quite a number of horse and cattle excursions up the hill toward Waimea. There are periodic farmers' markets that would be worth a visit, given the number of enterprising small farmers experimenting with all manner of good things (guys were selling farm-raised crawfish in Hawi the day we were there).
Better yet would be to spend a couple of relaxed days in the area; a number of bed and breakfasts operate in North Kohala.
Carl E. "Sonny" Koonce III • Special to The Advertiser Here's how to do a day trip:
Coming from Kona or Kohala Coast way, your tour begins at the junction of state Route 19 (the Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway) and state Route 270 (the Akoni Pule Highway) just before Kawaihae, where Pu'ukohola Heiau, the chilling war temple of Kamehameha I, bakes in the heat, looking out over a bay where sharks cruise an underwater sacred site, Hale O Kapuni.
North Kohala is Kamehameha territory. It was the birthplace (near 'Upolu Point) of the future king, and his boyhood home (in 'Awini Valley). The area is dotted with sacred sites, including several important heiau and legendary pohaku (stones).
Past Kawaihae, explore a 600-year-old village near the once-bustling port town of Mahukona (where steamships once regularly docked). It was excavated by the University of Hawai'i in the 1960s and '70s and is now called Lapakahi State Park, an intriguing stop for a self-guided tour of what is believed to have been a typical pre-contact shoreside enclave.
If you've got a four-wheel-drive vehicle, or if it's very dry and you're up for some bumps, the next stop would be Kamehameha's birthplace. From 270, drive makai to the small airport at 'Upolu Point, turn left onto the dirt road about one mile to the windswept field where Mo'okini Heiau has been restored by volunteers. The heiau is where Kamehameha was taken for a ritual after his birth in nearby Kapakai, Kokoiki, after a harrowing canoe journey. Prophecy had it that he would be a great warrior, and his family sent him to remote 'Awini Valley, several miles down the coast, to keep him safe from his enemies.
Back on 270, you're soon in the former plantation towns of Hawi (where the Kohala Mill smokestack still stands) and Kapa'au (where the statue of favorite son Kamehameha I fronts the North Kohala Civic Center). Here are local-style cafes, art galleries and shops with names like Passion Flower and Tropical Dreams — clothes, jewelry, homegrown honey, snacks, handmade essential oils, collectibles, furnishings and more are to be had.
Here, too, Jan and Frank Morgan operate a readers' garden of delights, Kohala Book Shop, featuring used and rare volumes on Hawai'i and Oceania, as well as contemporary books.
Carl E. "Sonny" Koonce III • Special to The Advertiser The Morgans bought out the stock of the now-legendary Tusitala Bookstore in Kailua on O'ahu and had it shipped over to the Big Island years ago. This is a friendly place where you can spend as much time as your schedule (and nonreading companions) will allow. If you're a collector, fill out a form, and the Morgans will watch for goodies for you.
It's possible to date the reign of sugar cane in the area almost to the day — from Feb. 3, 1863, when the Kohala Sugar Co. was incorporated, until October 1975, when the last load of Kohala Sugar. Co. sugar and molasses was unloaded at Kawaihae. A half-dozen mills came and went in sugar's 100-year history in the area. The plantations brought thousands of residents to the area from homelands as far away as China and Portugal.
"Kohala Keia," a 1977 history of the area put together by local residents, lists 56 stores that once flourished between Mahukona and Niuli'i — mom-and-pop general stores owned almost exclusively by first-generation Asian immigrants. A handful survive, bearing their founders' names, such as A. Arakaki Store and H. Naito Store. The historic Wo On store is now an art gallery and home of watercolorist and oil painter Patrick Louis Rankin. There were churches and temples, several theaters, an early macadamia farm operated by the Woodhouse family, a famous boarding school for Hawaiian girls and the equally famous Kohala Kim Chee factory at Kokoiki.
At the end of Akoni Pule Highway, a series of valleys that march east, beginning with Pololu and then 'Awini, and ending with Waipi'o, just over the line in Hamakua, provided an abundance of taro and sweet potatoes in traditional Hawaiian times, and later rice, until a 1920s cholera epidemic followed by the devastating 1946 tsunami drove people away. Now the end of the road is the jumping-off place for hikes and mule rides.
Remnants of all these periods of history are readily discoverable in North Kohala, but don't climb over gates or venture onto trails on private property. Do your research before venturing on any unguided hikes (check guide books, consult the state's Na Ala Hele trails Web site at www.hawaiitrails.org and try to talk to some locals). And do be sensitive when you visit sites sacred to traditional Hawaiians; don't walk on heiau or enter kapu places.
At Kawaihae on the North Kohala Coast, Pu'ukohola , the war heiau of Kamehameha I, overlooks the bay and an unforgiving landscape.
Wo On Store was one of the many retail shops, most run by immigrants, that operated on the North Kohala Coast in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The building is now the gallery home of artist Patrick Louis Rankin.
