Discover where to stay and find the best beaches with our Kauai, Hawaii: Insider Advice.
On one of my first trips to Kauai, an island so lovely its nickname is the Garden Isle, I began chatting with a local. After a few minutes he leaned closer and whispered a warning to watch out for the Puaa, a half-pig, half-man apparition that's reported to live in the mountains and that is seen mostly after too many mai tais. Natives believe that if you are driving with pork (a favorite Hawaiian food) in your car after midnight, the Puaa may cause your car to mysteriously come to a halt. If that happens, you are supposed to throw a few pieces of the meat out the window and, like magic, the engine will start again.
Such was the beginning of my twenty-year love affair with this enchanting island and its people, a warm, down-to-earth, superstitious lot who hold tightly to their centuries-old traditions. Demons aside, my husband, Brooke, and I have observed many powerful forces at work on Kauai — the smallest, least populated and most laid-back of the four major Hawaiian islands — primarily in the form of Mother Nature. Though we live in an equally beautiful place (Aspen, Colorado), it is Kauai's untamed aspect that captivated us and has made us return there every winter.
Unlike Oahu, with its high-rise resorts, or Maui, parts of which are overrun by time-shares, only 4.5 percent of Kauai's 555 square miles have been, or ever can be, developed for commercial or residential use. Much of the island, including an interior of the deepest of canyons and mountain cliffs covered with dense tropical foliage, is inaccessible. Mount Waialeale, at Kauai's center, is one of the rainiest spots on the planet; it gets in excess of thirty-six feet of water every year. Helicopter tours of this area reveal impossibly gorgeous scenery that has served as the backdrop for more than seventy-five movies, among them the Jurassic Park trilogy. (Of course, dinosaurs had been extinct for some sixty million years before the five-million-year-old Kauai emerged from the ocean.) Just as rugged is the magnificent Napali Coast, on the northwestern shore, a ferocious twenty-two-mile impasse of coastline, where the sole road skirting the island comes to a halt; visitors can explore it only on foot or by boat.
Nature has also had a hand in keeping development at bay, through a series of disasters. The Big Island of Hawaii has an active volcano, but Kauai gets a majority of the hurricanes: Dot in 1959, Iwa in 1982 and the latest and possibly most devastating, Iniki, which hit in 1992 and caused more than $2 billion in damage. Many of Kauai's earthen dams were built before federal standards existed; just last spring, torrential rains caused the forty-foot-high Kaloko Reservoir dam to burst and floodwaters to descend from the mountains. Ever philosophical, inhabitants believe that this is their gods' way of making things pono, or putting them back the way they were.
Even during fair weather, you get the sense that nature will always be the victor. Colorful bougainvilleas smother power lines no matter how often they are cut back. A fine mist fills the air on most days, rusting metal and thus creating a constant need for property upkeep. And the island's terrain is ardently protected by the local government. After a high-rise resort was built in the 1960s, a law was passed declaring that structures could not exceed the height of a coconut tree. Today there is no other building taller than forty feet.
For all its small-town charm, the Garden Isle has grown increasingly upscale in recent years. The northern shore, with some of the softest golden-sand beaches in the state, has homes that average $700,000, the largest number of resident celebrities (including Pierce Brosnan, Steve Case and Bette Midler) and mansions dotting its hillsides and beachfronts. The main town of Hanalei is a sleepy hippie hangout with only 500 full-timers, a few mom-and-pop restaurants, fields of taro root and surf shops. Reached by single-lane rickety bridges that are often impassable because of heavy rains, Hanalei sometimes finds itself isolated from the rest of the island. In winter, when the waves are at their peak, the town attracts hardy surfers.
