It is an unsettling feeling, like trespassing

Lawrence thinks my cultural induction would be helped by a visit to a kanikapila, a jam session held at the Coffees of Hawaii estate every Sunday, so we climb into his battered ute and hit the road again. The show is held in an open hangar with guests seated in chairs set on the pebbled earth. A group called Na Ohana Hoaloha, the Family of Friends, sings and strums traditional songs, explaining their meaning to the mostly local crowd who are encouraged to join in by dancing the hula or playing percussion. Some songs date back to 900AD, when the second wave of Polynesians came to Molokai, according to Lono, one of the players. “The songs survive through oral history, passed down through the generations. We don’t change anything because that would insult our ancestors and bring hewa, trouble. We keep it the same so we don’t invite bad spirits.” Good and bad spirits, powerful magic and kahunas (‘‘those who know the secrets’’) are frequent topics in my conversations with Hawaiians. Such concepts are not easy for blow-ins like me to grasp but I get the feeling we’re not supposed to. It’s enticing enough to get a sense that they persevere and that there are those, like Lawrence and his uncle, who continue to practise the old ways. For hundreds of years, Molokai has been renowned for its “powerful magic” and shunned by outsiders. “There’s still very much an elusive side to our culture that stems from 18,” Lawrence says, “when the missionaries came and banned the hula and stopped us speaking our language.” Maintaining tradition, being faithful to ancestors, is central to life on Molokai. That’s why tourism is deliberately low-key here and why development is not courted the way it has been elsewhere in Hawaii. “[Hawaiian] culture has been destroyed on the other islands, overrun by foreign investment,” Lawrence Rosetta Stone German says. “Molokai isn’t for everybody. It is for the few who will enjoy this laid-back lifestyle, learning about the culture and the history.” The island’s most shocking history lesson is found at the base of a 500-metre cliff. To reach it you mount a mule and ride in single file almost five kilometres down a narrow jungle track. Often the path is hemmed in by vegetation but there are regular clearings, especially on the 26 switchbacks that reveal amazing views of the mountain face shearing down to a sparkling bay beneath. Our destination is the leper colony at Kalaupapa, where 19 former patients are living out their days in an idyllic setting that has a brutal history. The first lepers were exiled to this lovely, lonely peninsula in 1866, victims of a prevailing religious dogma that held their disease was an “affliction from God”, a punishment for their sins. In reality it is a bacterium that attacks parts of the nervous system. Between 1866 and 1969, when Hawaii’s isolation laws were finally abolished, many thousands of sufferers were banished to this natural prison. At the bottom of the mountain, mule-riders board a vintage school bus for a tour of the settlement. We are forbidden to make contact with residents or to photograph them but it is rare for former patients to stir when tourists are afoot. The streets are so quiet it feels like a ghost town, except you know people are present. They have nowhere to go, after all. It is an unsettling feeling, like trespassing. It is also troubling to think we now pay to get close to people who were banned from society. I ask our guide, Kianini, what the residents think of becoming a tourist attraction for rubbernecks like us. “Half of them care for it, half of them don’t,” he replies.

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