My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  The Japanese like making models. Along the roads of Ōshima, and there is really only one main road which circumnavigates the island, are placed, at intervals, short, replica policemen, to remind motorists of the speed limit through habitations. The road curls with the carved coastline. At several points, where it has been cut through the rock, there are patterns of strata, curved like rainbows. The sea was blue and wild, advancing hungrily on the cliffs only to meet its eternal rebuff. It is the same everywhere; the attacking sea can only win by stealth. Inland the greenery filled every valley, with odd handkerchief farms and smallholdings carved out of the jungle. In the south was a splendidly deep harbour, a place called Habu, where a volcanic crater toppled, at some unknown and ancient time, into the ocean causing, one would imagine, a good deal of steam. The result is a beautiful place, three sides of the old crater hemming in the wharves and blue-roofed houses and the many boats, and the fourth opening out into the ocean. By accident it became the perfect port.

  On the thoughtful water, dozens of fishing boats lay reflectively, with one or two larger vessels loading at the wharves. The brown and black rocks rose in a scenic horseshoe, with flowers and shrubs tumbling over the crevices. The sun shone benignly and there was no wind here and few people.

  Okachi, on the upper coast, across the mountainside from Motomachi, is reached through silent valleys, full of tangled greenery. Occasionally there are hamlets by the roadside, one with another pair of friendly imitation policeman, red- and blue-roofed houses, vegetable gardens and fishing coves. But it was all quiet and sunlit, the mountain sheltering it from the wind.

  I stayed three days in Ōshima and never once did the summit of the mountain reveal itself (nor the ends of the hotel, for that matter) but although I missed the volcano it was, for me, another unique island, and the visit was worth it. At the end the tall and solemn Susumu, the Country and Western enthusiast, took me to the airport where we shook hands and bowed with great care and ceremony. Then he recited, straight and serious. ‘You leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when you be back again . . .’

  ŌSHIMA situated latitude 34°8’N and longitude 133°5’E; area 35 sq. m (91 sq. km); population approx. 10,500; Japan

  Kauai

  High in the Rainy Mountain

  As we were extremely unwilling, notwithstanding the suspicious circumstances of the preceding days, to believe that these people were cannibals, we now made some further enquiries on the subject.

  CAPTAIN COOK, killed by cannibals in Hawaii 1779

  The wettest place in the whole world is Mount Waialeale on Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. It averages 500 inches of rain a year but 686 inches were measured in 1981. Sometimes the rain is so powerful that meteorologists cannot reach the crater at the summit to read their own gauges. It is the only mountain on earth with a swamp on the top and is one of the most amazing and beautiful places I have ever seen.

  There is only one way to the top of Waialeale and that is by helicopter. Even then the cone is only rarely accessible, perhaps once every two months when the air briefly clears. I happened to choose one of those days.

  The helicopter was like a cheerful yellow butterfly (the company which flies it is called Papillon) and the pilot was a young Texan, Robert Bloom, quietly flamboyant, if that’s possible; he was drafted during the Vietnam war, he learned to fly, and then never went outside Texas. ‘I was real glad about that,’ he said with laconic honesty.

  Before we took off from Princeville, an airport with a garden and flower pots like a country railway station, Robert looked at the mountain 5,000 feet high, parcelled by its foothills, and announced that we were really lucky. Today we were going to make it to the crater, and that did not often happen. ‘And I’ve got a great music programme for you,’ he added. He noticed my grimace. Surely, I argued, to fly up to one of the world’s most alluring and inaccessible places was enough without orchestral accompaniment. No, he wanted me to hear the music as well. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll hear the music.’

  So after getting into the glass bubble, the rotors limbering up, I put on the earphones. Robert climbed aboard and I was in the co-pilot’s seat. I began to feel like James Bond. The pilot muttered to the control tower. We were clear to go. Over us the blades swung and sounded. The aircraft rose gingerly, tentative for the first few feet and then, as if feeling free, banked away and snorted for the hills. It was wonderful right from the start. He drove that machine like a motorbike, up the flanks of foothills, over the crests, down into crevices and valleys, roaring across jungled trees and pounding rivers, high then drifting deliberately into the most solemn canyons I have ever seen, ten waterfalls at a time whispering over their edges; then, quickly again, along bouldered slopes making goats gallop for cover, over more ridges, zipping over the last few feet so that yet another stunning vista yawned before us; over the crashing sea and a spouting school of whales, back again; banking, turning, holding, hovering . . . And all to the resounding music of Star Wars. What an adventure!

  It was like finding yourself accidentally caught up in the middle of a Cinerama spectacular; like being aboard a rollercoaster and riding through a dream. We scooped up a valley, merely feet – inches it seemed at times – clear of rocks and trees, and, braking, nosed into a dangling cloud. We emerged into green sunshine and an awesome crater bitten into the top of the earth. It was unbelievable; the most astonishing place. We sidled into the crater itself, walls on all sides, rivers of white water, and right before our noses a single majestic waterfall plunging nonchalantly from the topmost ridge.

  I did not need the music, but I had to admit it enhanced the thrill. The pilot pointed down. We were going to land in the crater of Waialeale, once sacred to the ancient people of Kauai, and a place where only a few have stepped before.

  As far as I could judge the floor of the huge hole was a riot of rocks and rivers tumbling from the waterfall pool. But in the middle of it all was a brief grass island, barely the size of the helicopter itself, and that is where we landed. Robert edged the machine in alongside the thunderous arm of the waterfall and set it down with the ease of a handshake on the wet grass. We climbed out.

  This was the secret place, the Sanctuary of the Gods. I stood and regarded the waterfall, and there are few more quieting sights than 100,000 tons of water toppling above your head.

  ‘We’re sure lucky today,’ shouted Robert looking at the blue sky beyond the spray. ‘Already we’ve had over 400 inches of rain this year and it’s still only May. Waialeale looks like she’s going to break last year’s record – 686 inches and that’s a lot of water.’

  Six months previously three honeymoon couples had been landed at this place. A mishap prevented the helicopter taking off again and radio communication broke down too. Night came on. ‘Nobody knew what had happened,’ related Robert. ‘The Navy sent a helicopter to search but the Navy had never been up here so I had to come with them. That was hair-raising. It was dark and getting through these canyons in daylight is difficult enough. One of the Navy guys was leaning through the hatch with a big light picking out the walls of rocks. I had to tell them which turn to make and when. It was all very, very quiet in there, believe me.’

  It was hopeless. They had to go back and return at first light. They found the machine. ‘The newly-weds were okay,’ said Robert. ‘They’d all slept together in the helicopter.’

  ‘How about the pilot?’ I asked. Robert grinned and said, ‘He slept underneath.’

  Four-fifths of Kauai is inaccessible to anything but helicopter. Boats can land on the great copper-rocked Na Pali Coast, but there are few landfalls that are not hazardous. (Oddly enough there is a government hut on one of those cut-off beaches – where we landed in the helicopter – which has an official notice saying ‘No Admittance!’ Bureaucracy travels far.) Within the island are the hidden places left to rivers, clouds and rainbows. Two cows and one man live inland from the unapproachable coast. The animals are the remnants of an attempt at ranching in one of the mor
e communicative valleys. The man wanders wild in the interior, seen only occasionally by the forest rangers.

  Hemming the coastline of the almost circular island is a road which omits the thirty-mile chunk of the Na Pali. By some whimsy of wind and weather the seaside regions have only a fraction of the rainfall of the big mountain, between fifteen and twenty inches a year, and it is here that the tourists go.

  But even along the holiday fringe there are some curiously neglected places. Hanapepe is a wry little town at the mouth of an ancient tribal valley. Its name means ‘make-baby’ but there appears to be little activity of any sort there today. It has the silence and demeanour of somewhere that has been running down for a long time; it possesses a decrepit charm; rusty buildings, leaning walls and weeds in the vacant streets. There are some tired, but picturesque, shops and a few lurking bars. At the centre of the muddy street is the Dance and Voice Training Establishment.

  Older things are in far better order. The origins of the extraordinary Menehune Fish Pond, 900 feet long, enclosed in green banks, is legendary. The Menehune were a miniature people, two feet in height, who accomplished prodigious feats of building and engineering overnight, always working under cover of darkness. (Perhaps they were the origin of the Seven Dwarfs?) The great fishpond was commissioned by a Prince and Princess who broke the rules by spying on the fairy people at work. They were, predictably, turned into rock for their pains and stand noticeably overlooking the magic valley.

  Kauai needs tourists, since its other main industry, sugar-cane, is at the mercy of hazardous world markets. But fortunately it will be some time, perhaps never, before the influx of tourists reaches anything like the proportions of Honolulu, ninety miles away. There ‘Aloha’ has become a slogan rather than a greeting, a farewell, or an endearment; not something that should happen to a poetic word. On Waikiki are multitudes of visitors hung with sweat and flowers. And there are few more daunting things than having a lei placed around your neck at two o’clock in the morning at Honolulu Airport.

  Kauai has its hotels and condominiums, a word even more hatefully abbreviated to condos; it has all the trappings and the tours. At the Coco Palms Hotel you can have ukulele and hula lessons and be wed in a church built for the film Sadie Thompson starring Rita Hayworth. (Extras offered at the service include two singers who sing ‘Hawaiian Wedding Songs’ made famous by Andy Williams – $25 and a conch-shell blower – $7.50). The officiating clergy is likely to be just as exotic. A beautiful Hawaiian girl, auditioning as a singer and hula dancer at the hotel, has also performed wedding ceremonies at the chapel. She produced a business card for me giving her hula name, Elethe Aguiae, and on the other side, the Reverend Elithe Hoylea. The latter did not look right in lights, she said.

  But Grace Guslander, the remarkable lady who ran the resort, started with no more than a boarding house, and she had properly preserved something of the old Hawaii among the packaged hours and days that so many people demand and for which they return expectantly each year. In the grounds of Coco Palms, which stands on the site of an ancient tribal palace, is a modest museum, overseen by a courtly Hawaiian lady called Mrs Sarah Kelekonia Sheldon whose great-great-grandfather was a retainer in the household of the last Hawaiian King.

  She sits surrounded by pictures, books, flags and furniture which her ancestor would have known and touched. There is a huge four-poster from Kentucky, with a native Queen’s picture above it, for it was her bed. The canopy is a Hawaiian flag, that curious banner with eight red, white and blue stripes and in one corner a Union Jack.

  This amalgam was the brainchild of King Kamehameha, the first ruler of all the Hawaiian Islands (Kauai was the last to come under his throne and did so then only by the persuasion of a fleet of European mercenaries with gunboats). His Majesty had been presented with a red ensign by Captain George Vancouver, the British navigator, in 1793. He persuaded himself that he was a link between his royal line and that of Great Britain, and flew the flag, a Union Jack on a red ground, at his palace. In retaliation Kaumualii, the subdued ruler of Kauai, still with local powers, conferred upon himself the title of King George.

  The comic-opera element is strongly in evidence. The Russians appeared upon the scene in the person of Georg Anton Scheffer, a German doctor working for the American-Russian Alaska Company, a consortium with fingers spread far. He privately persuaded Kaumualii that, with the help of the Tsar, he could reverse the roles with Kamehameha and become king of all Hawaii.

  Together they raised the fortress on Kauai, the ruins of which are still to be seen today. It was called Fort Elizabeth, after the queen of Russia, and was built in the form of a six-pointed star. Scheffer and King Kaumualii, the odd couple, built this fort in 1817, but afterwards the adventure came inevitably to grief (the Tsar in distant Moscow said he preferred not to become involved) and the fort was left to tumble quietly down. Half a century after the episode thirty-eight cannons, clogged with rust, earth, weeds and flowers, were prised from the battlements. Today’s joke about the fort is that little is to be seen except the footings of overgrown walls, but a short distance away is a public convenience of distinct blockhouse characteristics. Tourists, seeking the Russian fort, take photographs of that.

  The Hawaiian alphabet is only twelve letters long, but these repeated, over and over, like a gargle, add up to some of the world’s longest words. In the same tradition its most elongated word Umuhumunukunukuopuopaa (or thereabouts) is given to a fish so small you could not write its name on its back. By contrast, high in the mountains is still to be found the O-o bird, although few in number, for the breed was all but exterminated by the natives to collect the bright yellow feathers for the sumptuous cloaks of the Hawaiian kings. Eight thousand birds made one cloak.

  When Captain Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands (which he, being a prosaic man, dubbed the Sandwich Islands after the Earl of Sandwich) he came first to Kauai in the Resolution, landing at Waimea Bay in January 1778. This solid but extraordinary adventurer, who the following year was to die at the hands of capricious and cannibalistic natives on the neighbouring island, was greeted by the King of Kauai as an expected God called Lono. The soothsayers had predicted a visit by fair-skinned deities, breathing fire, and journeying on floating tree-clad islands.

  Over the blue horizon came the tall-masted ships, their men puffing away at their pipes, the officers wearing tricorn hats. The first Kauai natives to greet the newcomers reported that in addition to breathing fire the gods had three-cornered heads.

  When standing at the spot of Cook’s landing, the beach piled with the rubbish of a recent storm, I looked across to the shadow of Niihau, the only island in the group that Captain Cook might recognize today. Niihau is isolated, kept apart from the rest of the world and Hawaii by the decree of the Robinson family which has owned it for generations. It had one strange moment of limelight on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, for one of the Japanese planes, hit by gunfire, crashed on the island. Since nobody on Niihau ever heard any news (they still don’t) the armed pilot was able to take over the island single-handed. Eventually he shot at the only policeman, who, despite having three bullets in his chest, killed the Japanese by throwing him furiously against a wall.

  Today Niihau has about 200 inhabitants, all of pure Hawaiian blood, and the archaic Hawaiian language is still taught in the school there. Supplies (and that means water too, for within sight of Kauai’s great drenched mountain, Niihau has only five inches of rain a year) are carried across on a World War II landing barge. There are no paved roads and no electricity (and thus no television) on the island and visitors are actively discouraged. ‘For anyone but an inhabitant to go there is very difficult indeed,’ a Kauai islander told me. ‘If you took a boat across yourself you would probably be met by a Robinson employee on horseback – and holding a gun.’

  A few years ago a party of educationalists from Honolulu was permitted to land on the island to inspect the school. When they returned, as from another world, and
told their stories on Hawaii television some were in tears for they had witnessed the islands as they once were; they had seen both beauty and simplicity. Back in the ruins of highrise buildings, cars, jet airliners, dust and commercialism, they realized that the killing of 8,000 birds for a royal cloak for the earliest Hawaiian rulers had only been the beginning. They knew what they, as a people, had lost forever.

  KAUAI situated latitude 21°40’N and longitude 160°35’W; area 551 sq. m (1,427 sq. km); population approx. 138,856; Hawaiian Group, USA

  Tahiti

  Slightly This Side of Heaven

  Oh, Heaven’s Heaven! – but we’ll be missing

  The palms, and sunlight, and the south.

  RUPERT BROOKE, Tiara Tahiti

  In the old days there was a bar on the waterfront at Papeete called Quinn’s, legendary throughout the South Pacific and beyond; a place of women, shadows, heat and booze, and justly popular. Now the site is occupied by a French insurance company, housed in a sanitized office block, which advertises protection against divers risques, accidentes, maladies, all things that were nightly occurrences at Quinn’s.

  Tahiti, like everywhere, has changed. No one could change the green of the hills nor diminish the extravagance of a sunset, but now the island has an autoroute (albeit one of the world’s shortest), luminous hotels and restaurants and a ferry made from an assembly-kit that replaces the old ragged schooner that once sailed south to the Austral Islands. The site of Paul Gauguin’s last house is a used car lot; the leper colony is down to its last forty-two lepers. Who can argue but that it is a better place?