On to the Outer Islands

Some time soon after he arrives in Hawaii, a sweet lassitude creeps over the malihini (newcomer). It may come when he sweeps back the curtain in his air-conditioned hotel room, to survey a velvety emerald view of rice fields, crew-cut golfing greens, jagged peaks with their heads in the clouds, or the azure ocean. It may come as he sits sipping a mai tai (assorted rums, lime, sugar and pineapple), served by a statuesque dark-haired wahine in a billowing muu muu with a blood-red anthurium in her hair. It may come even later, as he wanders along a ginger-golden beach. Somehow, everything in Hawaii seems to be soft and warm--the air, the ocean, the sand, the music and the people.

Let the spell take the visitor too firmly and his ambition wavers, his memory clouds. That, in Hawaii, is a pleasant affliction known as "Polynesian paralysis." But one thing that is most emphatically not suffering from paralysis in Hawaii is the tourist business. Since statehood and the jets arrived, tourism has taken off like a surfer riding one of the 25-ft. "Castle Break" curls at Makaha Beach. In 1960, there were 296,517 mainland visitors to the state. In 1966, there will be 700,000. The most conservative estimate predicts 1,000,000 visitors by 1970, the most optimistic, 2,000,000 by 1972.

Bikinis Ho. The jet rush is on, and no letup is in sight. The number of passengers through Honolulu airport has more than doubled in six years, and airline executives foresee an even greater escalation after the 490-passenger "Jumbo" Boeing jets start to fly in 1969. Some visitors flying tourist class pay only $100 for the five-hour flight from

Los Angeles or San Francisco. No fewer than 18 airlines are begging the CAB to let them put new flights on the Honolulu route. Already, tourists spend $300 million a year, making tourism Hawaii's largest civilian source of income, larger than the pineapple and sugar businesses combined. To accommodate them, some $350 million worth of hotel construction has gone up in the past five years. The boom has also created new jobs to absorb the unemployment created by automation on the plantations. Tourism's latest and most exciting surge is now to outer Oahu and what the Hawaiians like to call the Neighbor Islands (see color pages).

To be sure, no place shows signs of the current expansion more obstreperously than Honolulu's Waikiki Beach. The vast majority of Oahu's 109 resort hotels lies along the graceful crescent that stretches west from Diamond Head. Henry Kaiser's 900-room Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki boasts the best bikini watching in the islands; just beyond it, the ebullient Chinese-Hawaiian multimillionaire Chinn Ho has erected the slender, glassy new $27 million Ilikai, with condominium apartments, shops, offices and a rooftop lounge that draws even the kamaainas (oldtimers) from Honolulu.

18 Minutes Away. Yet Waikiki can be a disappointment. The beaches are getting crowded. Some of the new hotels (such as the 535-room Outrigger, opening this month) are designed to be low on price and sparing on service. The shops and sightseeing in Honolulu itself are still the most varied, and new attractions, such as the performing dolphins at Taylor Pryor's Sea Life Park at Makapuu Point, draw enthusiastic visitors. But the visitors do not necessarily return to stay at Waikiki. Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. are now moving out to the sleek, discreet $11 million Kahala Hilton on the more exclusive, eastern side of Diamond Head. Even farther away, Chinn Ho has broken ground for a 5,000-acre resort at isolated Makaha, which will be the first to put adequate hotel space close to the superb northern surfing beaches on Oahu.

Increasingly, tourists in search of Hawaii's fabled charms look beyond Oahu. Jackie Kennedy visited Laurance Rockefeller's ranch house at the 265,000-acre Parker ranch on the "Big Island" of Hawaii this summer. Barbara Hutton tried the Royal Lahaina Hotel on Maui. Lynda Bird picked Kauai for her latest trip.

In the wake of the trend setters, a wave of tourists is now heading for the island resorts. Long Island Banker Patrick Clifford and his wife Mary are typical. They have made four trips to Hawaii in the past four years, and not once left Oahu. But, says Mary, "I'm so disappointed at the way Waikiki's been built up." This year, they will see all three of the major outer islands.

Five years ago, two-thirds of Hawaii's visitors saw only Oahu. Today, two-thirds of them see at least one Neighbor Island. And why not? Maui and Kauai are only $12.57 and 18 minutes away by DC-9 jet; Hawaii's Kona airport is a mere 43 minutes and $16.95 by turboprop Convair. Air-taxi services also operate to the 15 state and private airstrips on the islands, offer island-hopping tours for as little as $75.

Day on the Moon. What is enticing the tourists farther afield is not the search for better weather. All the islands of the southernmost state- enjoy a year-round balmy climate (average mean temperature: 75DEG). And, because of the prevailing northeast trade winds, the southwestern coasts of all of its islands (and not just Oahu) are nearly rain-free all year round.

The lure of the outer islands is their spectacular scenery. On the oldest and most fertile island, Kauai, spreading Plumiera (frangipani), symmetrical Norfolk pine, fragrant pikake blossoms and the umbrella-shaped monkeypod trees set off lush folded ridges, twisting valleys and cascading waterfalls. Youthful (2,800,000-year-old) Hawaii has arid, cactus-sprinkled, sleepily sloping uplands, rain forests, anthurium and macadamia groves, bizarre moonscapes of rock lava topped by the snow-capped peaks of Mauna Kea (13,796 ft.) and still-active Mauna Loa (13,680 ft.). Middle-aged Maui is dominated by the rugged crater of dormant Haleakala (House of the Sun). At its rim nestles a Defense Department observatory; the pack trip to the floor of the crater is like spending a day on the moon.

Exploring Burial Caves. To accommodate visitors new luxury hotels are also proliferating in the Neighbor Islands. Empress of the group is Laurance Rockefeller's $15 million Mauna Kea on Hawaii. Among its attractions: rooms and promenades full of Polynesian wood carvings, inner courtyards luxuriant with bamboo, hibiscus and banana trees, plus exclusive rights to canter over the Parker ranch with jovial Hawaiian paniolas (cowboys) and a challenging 18-hole $2,000,000 golf course. Since its opening in July, 1965, Mauna Kea has been virtually S.R.O. It is raising its rates this month to $51 and $65 for a double, including two meals a day.

Some 35 miles farther south on Hawaii is Johno Jackson's isolated plush-primitive Kona Village, three months old. Jackson is a World War II P-51 pilot and California oil millionaire who delights in spinning tales of ancient Hawaii for his guests, offers them skin diving, sunfish sailing, and trips in his Jeep across the cinder beds and lava fields to explore ancient native burial caves. In the sleepy village of Kailua-Kona, close to some of the most exciting fishing grounds of the world (bonefish, blue marlin, Ahi and the jack crevalle), the venerable Kona Inn and the newer (1960) King Kamehameha are being joined by a $4,000,000 Kona Hilton, due to be finished in December 1967. The Bishop Estate (which owns 9% of the land in the state) has nearly finished the first of two 18-hole golf courses, part of a planned $47 million resort hotel development just south of Kailua-Kona, which will locate 3,000 rooms around protected, man-made beaches.

Cavorting Whales. On Maui, known as "The Valley Isle," mangoes, papaya and passion fruit on the roadside wait to be plucked by the passing traveler. The newest and best resort hotels are going up along a peerless, three-mile stretch of white beach on the southwestern side of the Kaanapali area, where the low-slung Royal Lahaina, the Royal Kaanapali and the towering Sheraton-Maui, built on a lava rock outcropping, together share a $1,800,000 golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones and blasted out of the slopes of Mount Puu Kukui. A $6,000,000 Hale Kaanapali Hilton condominium will open near by in February, to be followed by a 3,300-room hotel development built by Amfac, Inc., one of Hawaii's great factoring combines.

Only a 15-minute drive from Kaanapali is the 19th century town of Lahaina, capital of Hawaii in the days of King Kamehameha III (1833-54) and a brawling happy-go-lucky port of call for whaling fleets. Under a $1,600,000 state grant, Lahaina's old palaces and prisons, missionary homes and hospitals are being restored into a sort of Polynesian Williamsburg. Tourists can cruise offshore in the 53-ft. schooner The Allure and, in wintertime, watch the herds of 50-ft.-long humpback and lob-tail whales that frolic and cavort with their calves as close as 150 ft. from shore.

House of Happy Talk. Kauai ("The Garden Island") likes to think it has best safeguarded the ancient Hawaiian traditions of hospitality. The "Aloha spirit" has been adulterated on bustling Waikiki with too many cheap grass skirts and plastic leis. But it still thrives on Kauai, where farmers tend their lush taro patches and fish with nets from the reefs much as their forefathers did. Local boys and girls mingle with the young crowd of guests in the Prince Kuhio piano bar of the new Kauai Surf, at Kalapaki Bay, whe ~e the waves come in just right for beginning surfers.

Local color--real and synthetic--is everywhere on Kauai. At the Coco Palms, surrounded by Hawaii's largest coconut orchard, conch shells are sounded each evening, while runners race through the darkened groves, whirling their flaming torches and lighting up flares, just as they did in the courts of the alii (chieftains). The Hanalei Plantation (opposite), which includes a 20th Century Fox set designer's re-creation of a Hawaiian monarch's palace, overlooks the beach where Mitzi Gaynor washed that man right outa her hair in South Pacific. Owner Lyle Guslander, who has built hotels on all three of the major Neighbor Islands, insists that every employee learn the name of every guest. Evenings in its House of Happy Talk lounge are apt to turn into one big Hawaiian house party.

But the real thrill is to leave civilization altogether. One of the best points of departure is Hanalei; from there Kauai helicopters (for a fee of $100 an hour) take picnickers or sightseers to visit the two-thirds of the island that is accessible no other way: the rim of the crater of long-dead Mount Waia-leale (with 400 to 800 inches of rain a year, the wettest spot on earth), the hidden beaches like Honopu and the Valley of the Lost Tribe on the Na Pali coast, populated today only by prancing mountain goats. Said Jackie, after she had picnicked at one of Kauai's inaccessible beaches hemmed by steep lava cliffs: "I had forgotten--and my children had never known--what it is like to discover a new place, unwatched and unnoticed."

-Easy way to win a bet: ask which are the southernmost, northernmost, westernmost and easternmost states. Answers: Hawaii, Alaska, Alaska--and Alaska, which is easternmost because it crosses the 180th meridian.

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