Island life simplifed in Molokai

Years of seeing those bumper stickers “I’d rather be riding a mule on Molokai” had conditioned me for the adventure and now here we were, part of a mule train descending the side of a 1,700-foot-high cliff, zigzagging on a narrow trail with steep, hairpin turns and dizzying views of the rocky beach and jungle below.

Our destination was the historic leper colony of Kalaupapa on a remote, wind-swept Hawaiian peninsula battered by crashing waves, what had been a repository for thousands of exiled souls before modern medicine lifted the scourge of their disease.

As our beasts-of-burden lurched and veered from side to side, their hooves clattering on the rocky, sometimes muddy path, the phrase “sure footed-mule” kept going through my head like an assuring mantra that would prevent any mishap and deliver us safely.

I leaned back in the stirrups to better balance the plunging steps of my mule “Alex,” and after more than an hour and almost three miles of descent, our pack of six visitors and three “mule skinner” guides arrived.

This would be one of the highlights of a six-day visit on Molokai, an island described as Hawaii like it used to be, where you can escape the hordes of tourists that flock to Waikiki or those whose exposure to Hawaiian culture is limited to the Grand Luau of a Maui resort.

On Molokai, there are no high rises - they brag that no building is higher than a coconut tree. The 38-mile-long island has only 8,000 inhabitants and not a single traffic light.

It’s touted as the birthplace of the hula and the site of the bay where Polynesian voyagers first landed on the Hawaiian Islands.

“It’s one of the most sacred, special places on the face of this Earth,” said Teri Waros, owner of a bookstore in Kaunakakai, a community of a few blocks and pretty much the only semblance of a town on Molokai.

“It’s people who get life, the simplicity of life on Molokai,” she told me and my wife as we chatted about what defines the island.

“Every island has a different personality or different energy,” she said. “We live in our heart space here.”

Molokai, she continued, is “all family. We’re not overrun, racing to get the bigger bucks, driving a faster car.

“I‘m so appreciative. All it takes is 24 hours in Honolulu.”

That was a typical refrain from locals who have resisted attempts to allow more tourism by way of small cruise ships and resorts.

“Don‘t change Molokai. Let Molokai change you,” was how the owner of a macadamia nut farm dating to the 1920s put it, as we sampled macadamia blossom honey and learned to crack nuts in the afternoon shade of the orchard.

Only 40 miles from Oahu and a 20-minute ride on a hopper plane from Maui, Molokai is easy enough to reach but has a fraction of the visitors drawn to the other islands.

There is only one hotel to speak of, but a number of vacation homes are available for rent. We stayed in a quiet, second-floor beach condominium on the west end of the island with a perfect sunset vantage point. Often windy, we had the sounds of breaking waves and geckos, and the sight of colorful birds alighting on our veranda in the morning. Our only bother was some lingering wasps on our balcony, but they seemed less interested in us than in the wooden eaves.

Our place overlooked what had once been a golf course, now entirely overgrown with wild vegetation. We could go on a short hike to a rocky promontory with sweeping views of the island, including 3-mile-long Papohaku Beach, isolated and pristine, but with dangerous surf that dissuades swimming.

One day we drove our rental car on a tour of Halawa Valley, a scenic 28-mile ride consisting of deserted beaches, ancient fish ponds, farmlands and steep mountain slopes punctuated by a couple of distant waterfalls. For the last few miles of the one-lane road, there were serious blind turns that you negotiate at 5 miles per hour. Fortunately, we had it pretty much to ourselves, rarely encountering another vehicle.

But it was the isolation of the leper colony on our mule expedition, as well as the somber history of the place, that made the deeper impression.

These days only a half-dozen or so people who contracted leprosy, now known as Hansen’s Disease, live in the colony. They live there by choice, unlike most of the 8,000 patients who were brought there over the span of a century, even after antibiotics were developed in the mid-1940s to treat the disease.

But when lepers first arrived in 1866, they were essentially abandoned and made to fend for themselves because of their illness. Sometimes they were cast into the surf by the ships that brought them, to either perish or make it to shore.

As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote on his visit in 1889: “They were strangers to each other, collected by common calamity, disfigured, mortally sick, banished without sin from home and friends.”

At this melancholy landing, he said, “all came with sorrow at heart, many with despair and rage.”

Death occurred almost daily among the population by the time a young Belgian priest, Father Damien de Veuster, arrived in 1873.

He gave himself unconditionally to the exiled, eventually succumbing to the disease himself. He also attained Catholic sainthood along with Mother Marianne Cope of the Sisters of St. Francis, who carried on his work at the colony.

After arriving by mule down the mountain path, we joined a group of a dozen or so people - including a couple of priests - who had flown in by small planes to an airstrip near the colony. We boarded an old school bus that took us to the churchyard grave of Father Damien, next to the coastline of towering cliffs.

You can arrive without riding a mule, although it’s debatable which method is safest.

One airplane crashed into the water on take-off from Kalaupapa in 2013, with one fatality.

I had to ask Buzzy Sprout, the operator of the Mule Tour, about his safety record in the 40 years he has been doing it. But I waited until our mule train had climbed back up the mountain and returned to the barn.

“Now that it’s all over, have you ever lost a mule or a rider?” I said with a nervous laugh.

“One mule” was his reply, and he proceeded to tell the story about one of his riderless mules that got spooked by some construction work going on near a bridge.

The animal fell down. They untied it from the mule train and tried to turn it around, but it struggled and slid off the bridge.

“Everybody says to me, ‘Did he fall a long ways?’ Long enough to kill him,” Sprout said.

I asked if the mules ever stumbled.

Sometimes they do, he conceded. “Usually I tell people if the mule’s going to go to his knees, don’t get off; because they’re going to jump right back up.”

So yes, go to Molokai - and ride that mule.