Hawaii, My Old Friend : Away From the Glitz of Flashy Resorts, the Big Island’s Upcountry is Lost in Time

HOLUALOA, Hawaii —  I came in search of old Hawaii, an image grown dim, and discovered it upcountry on the slopes of Mt. Hualalai--in a gentle village given over to the simple pleasures of a distant past.

Tradewinds scatter plumeria blossoms along Mamalahoa Road and the sun rises high over the Pacific. And although the calendar says July, the Kona Hotel remains festooned with Christmas lights and wreaths that remain from the holidays.

Far from the Big Island’s showy resorts, Holualoa, with its tin-roofed shanties is caught up in a time warp.

Holualoa Town: One ramshackle hotel, a B&B;, a postage stamp-size post office, a library (open only two days a week), an old-fashioned gas station and a scattering of art galleries. This along with a prize the world seeks so restlessly: serenity. Just don’t expect palm trees and waterfalls. (This is unadorned Hawaii).

In Holualoa Town there’s not a single high-rise. Not even a working traffic signal. Instead there are 1930s storefronts and the coolness of mountain air, 1,200 feet above Kailua-Kona.

A colony for painters and potters and basket weavers, the action in Holualoa revolves around the Kona Arts Center (a.k.a. The Coffee Mill Workshop), where classes are held Tuesday through Saturday in an ancient coffee mill with a leaky roof, classical recordings and the volunteer instruction of Bob and Carol Rogers, a pair of ex-schoolteachers who fled California 30 years ago to retire in Hawaii. To do nothing. Absolutely nothing!

Only one day they awoke to find life had become “a beautiful bore.” Each day the waves were alike. The weather seldom changed. They’d perfected their suntans. Their artistic souls hungered for something more satisfying.

Up in Holualoa Town, Rogers, who looks like a balding Benny Goodman, discovered this abandoned coffee mill facing Mamalahoa Road, and after spiffing it up (painting it Easter egg colors) he and Carol moved in easels and oils and potters wheels and announced to islanders that they were offering free lessons, no restrictions.

That was 25 years ago. Since then the Kona Arts Center has turned out several promising Gauguins. Also a Grandma Moses-type whose primitive paintings grace more than one home. And there is Hiroke Morinoue, who studied with “Uncle Bob” and “Auntie Carol,” then opened his own gallery in an abandoned Laundromat opposite the Art Center where he produces watercolors and sculptures that are exhibited in galleries from Boston to Japan.

A glassblower set up shop on Mamalahoa Road. His neighbors are Matt and Mary Lovein, late of Laguna Niguel, who create ceramics and oil paintings and watercolors in a Lilliputian shop with a gravel floor.

A one-horse town, Holualoa is reminiscent of a scene from that old celluloid Western, “High Noon,” a village that flourished when the coffee bean was king and Model T Ford trucks served Kona’s plantations.

In those days, coffee workers occupied the Kona Hotel, where Goro Inaba and his wife Yayoko have been doing business since 1926. The hotel is old and rusty and, yes, just a bit charming--if one isn’t seeking Hilton-style amenities.

A sign in a bath reads, “Please do not flush the toilet if someone is taking a shower.” So the water pressure is low and there are no TVs in the rooms or armoires or perfumed soaps. But there’s the sense of the old Hawaii I came searching for. Indeed, one half expects to bump into W. Somerset Maugham, or run headlong into Mark Twain on the creaky stairway.

Although the 11-room hotel is without kitchen or bar, it’s a steal at $15 a night for a single and $23 for a double. One guest wrote: “This hotel has heart and soul and personality. Kindness, generosity and hospitality abide.”

Ordinarily this is true, but Goro Inaba loses his cool on occasion. The other day he was napping in the lobby when a stranger rang impatiently at the registration desk.

Inaba opened one eye and yawned. “What you want?”

“I wish to see a room,” the grumpy visitor replied.

Inaba yawned again. “I don’t show rooms. What do you think this is, a Sheraton? What you want for $15?”

The stranger persisted. “I wish to see if the room is clean, sir.” (The “sir” had a sarcastic ring).

Inaba stood up and faced the stranger. “Of course it’s clean. But you ain’t gonna see it till I see the $15.”

The phone rang. A woman in Dallas, Texas was inquiring for a room. Inaba shrugged. “All word of mouth,” he said, hanging up. “People come from everywhere. Europe. Japan. The mainland. A doctor been here three times from Germany.”

Strangers hear about the plantation atmosphere, said Inaba. That and the loo. The loo rises at the end of a suspended walkway, two floors up, framing a magnificent view of the Pacific hundreds of feet below--the only outhouse with a window in Holualoa and probably the entire Big Island.

“It’s a throne overlooking Eden,” said Inaba. His wife smiled her approval.

In the evenings, guests relax in wicker chairs on a second-floor veranda, studying the action in the street and mountains that rise above the hotel. When rain spatters against the rusty, corrugated tin roof, guests retire inside, joining Inaba and his wife in the cluttered lobby with its TV set, an ancient Singer sewing machine, and a picture of Ellison Onizuka, the astronaut who died in the Challenger disaster and who was reared in Holualoa. Just down Mamalahoa Road, Onizuka’s parents ran a family grocery.

Inaba’s Kona Hotel resembles a 1930s plantation mansion with sagging floors, potted plants and the atmosphere of a time that’s long since run its course.

At the other end of the scale, Holualoa features what knowledgeable travelers consider the finest B&B; on this or any other island in Hawaii. Set on a slope, overlooking a 40-acre cattle ranch and a coffee plantation, Holualoa Inn is a showplace of cedar and eucalyptus with picture windows that frame Kailua-Kona and the Pacific Ocean.

Guests gather in a lounge with a billiard table and shelves of books. And while the fireplace is being lit they retire to a rooftop gazebo for an unobstructed view of one of Hawaii’s famous sunsets.

There are but four rooms in this large and luxurious estate (the Hibiscus Suite features a Jacuzzi and provides a smashing view of the ocean).

Holualoa Inn is reached along a sloping, shady driveway lined with flowers and shrubs. Papaya fresh off garden trees is served for breakfast with home-grown mangos, bananas, macadamia nut butter, home-canned jams and jellies, cereals, and pastries delivered daily from a French bakery in Kailua-Kona.

The Holualoa Inn is impossible to fault. The former retreat of newspaper publisher Thurston Twigg-Smith, it simply sparkles--a testimonial to the dedicated spirit of manager Lisen Gunderson who moves about in stocking feet, scrubbing and cleaning until not a speck of dust remains.

For vacationers searching for total privacy, Holualoa Inn, with its spotless rooms and a meticulously manicured garden, would be hard to match anywhere in the Pacific--the silence disturbed only by the song of mynah birds and the voice of the wind blowing in from the ocean.

Only breakfast is served at Holualoa Inn and in town one can’t buy so much as a Big Mac, simply because there’s not a single restaurant. This is old, laid-back Hawaii, and so one has the option of driving into Kailua-Kona or shopping in a country grocery whose shelves are loaded with taro chips, fish jerky, dried seaweed, mango candy, rice cakes, coconut cookies, roasted sesame seeds and peppermint schnapps, among other esoteric items.

Fish jerky? Dried seaweed?

Thanks, but I chose Kailua-Kona and dinner by candlelight at Jamesons-by-the-Sea, which is a personal favorite. Other vacationers dine at Huggos or The Beach Club, with tables on the ocean and a menu that lists a pepper pasta with jalapeno cream, confetti fettuccine, fresh local fish, bouillabaisse with Pernod, coconut scampi sauteed with sweet peppers and artichoke hearts, and a Thai salad served hot with strips of beef, sliced chicken, mushrooms and a spicy vinaigrette.

For lunch, back in Holualoa at Bob and Carol Rogers’ Kona Arts Center, visitors join painters and weavers for pot-luck lunches that one recent day featured poi cakes, lasagna, macadamia nut cookies, guava juice and Kona coffee. The coffee pot stays warm daylong at the center, whose retiree-artists (both islanders and mainlanders) provide the lunch. There’s 71-year-old Winke Change, who drives the 80 miles from Hilo with his wife Lillian to putter with clay and paint and to exchange pleasantries with Kay Nakatani, Anna Tanaka, George Mauser (formerly of Newport Beach) and 83-year-old Joe Crow, an ex-apple grower from Washington state.

In the search for old Hawaii, I also discovered it in Captain Cook, a village setting reminiscent of Holualoa. Captain Cook sits high above the Pacific, 11 miles south of Kona. Like the Kona Hotel in Holualoa, Captain Cook’s 42-room Manago Hotel appears like the set for a Hollywood Western. You look for Jack Palance at the bar and expect John Wayne to come sashaying into the lobby.

At the Manago, guests sleep in Western-style rooms or crash on the floor on a futon mat in a scene straight out of Japan. Like a Japanese inn, the Manago features a miniature garden with a waterfall and a pond boiling with carp. Besides providing atmosphere, the Manago is a Big Island bargain, with singles beginning at $18 and doubles pegged at $21 and up.

Guests gather in a TV room just off the lobby, and there’s a restaurant serving mahi mahi ($6.50), a 12-ounce steak ($10) and burgers for a buck seventy-five.

Harold Manago, 71, tends bar, his 95-year-old mother, Osame, tends the garden and Manago’s son, Dwight, works behind the desk.

Earlier I drove along the Kohala Coast and upcountry to Kamuela and beyond to Honokaa (Dodge City with an ocean), making a pit stop at Tex’s Diner off Mud Lane to check out the malasadas (Portuguese donuts without a hole) before heading toward Waipio Valley on the north shore. The road slips past sleepy plantation towns, sugar cane fields, banana groves and a coast lined with bougainvillea, hibiscus, African tulips and coconut palms that arch over deserted beaches.

Between Honokaa and Waipio Valley, ex-Californian, Jacqueline Horne, operates her Waipio Wayside Inn on an old sugar plantation surrounded by cane fields. Guests have a choice of four rooms with different themes: the Moon Room, the Plantation Room, the Chinese Room and the Bird’s Eye Room.

In the evening they repair to a gazebo in the garden, and afterward lounge in the old home with books supplied by the proprietress. Horne, who loves to cook, turns out “breakfast surprises that depend on my mood.”

Vacationers traveling on to Waipio Valley stock up on foodstuffs at the Last Chance Store where, besides groceries, everything imaginable is displayed, from gumdrops and rubber boots to bib overalls.

In the Waipio Valley, Tom Araki rents out five rooms in a clapboard inn that’s as peaceful as the first blush of dawn, as indeed the entire valley is. Waterfalls pound the earth and ocean tides spill onto a black sand beach, and lanterns flicker in Tom Araki’s inn where guests prepare meals on a kerosene stove.

In the Waipio Valley, beyond Araki’s place, Linda Beech does the honors at the Treehouse Inn, where vacationers snooze in a monkeypod tree. Beech’s unusual inn is designed for the adventurer looking to escape the world’s stresses and frustrations. Windows are screened, a waterfall is visible, and the world, for the moment, is serene.

Waipio Valley lures vacationers searching for the unknown. They hike through jungle paths and ford streams and sunbathe on this incredible black sand beach that’s littered with driftwood. They pick papayas and bananas for breakfast and spend nights studying the stars.

No tension, no stress, no pressure. Only the thunder of waterfalls and the pounding of ocean waves . . . and the promise of still another peaceful tomorrow.