Diana Connor 
We entered the Honolulu airport with furrowed brows trying to find signs directing us to the Mokelele airlines counter. In decades of travel, I had not heard of this airline and almost feared I had been taken advantage of and sold fake tickets. Instead of having to retreat home, an airport attendant directed us to the terminal located down the ramp, out the closed door, under the tarped walkway, passed workers on a lunchbreak who opened a locked door and informed us of our arrival to the correct terminal.
It was as if we walked through the doors of a time-machine that now landed us in the past; possibly 3 decades earlier. There was no TSA to require us to doff our shoes and chug remaining water. No clamoring of other tourists or crying babies. There were seven other people in this ghost terminal and it was 45 minutes until our scheduled departure time for the flight to Molokai. The minutes ticked down until departure time approached 10 minutes, yet no announcement was made to “line up for boarding” nor a notification to consolidate luggage, or other standard announcements. I again wondered if this was as real ticket. Five minutes before the flight was set to depart, a gate agent appeared and asked all (eight) of us in the area to approach the door for boarding. She gave us a number and we stood in line like grade school students. When the door opened, the sesna 9-seater propeller plane revealed itself, and our three-day extended Easter weekend exploring the Hawaiian island of Molokai began.
We planned the usual tourist activities; a day trip to hike down to Kalaupapa (the leprosy settlement from the 1900’s) and a one-day hike to Halawa Valley the other day. The final day, Easter, we planned to hike some remote trails and find a big Sunday Easter brunch.
Molokai is notoriously known to be a laid-back island and besides these two planned activities we assumed not too much would occur and it would be one of those sleepy holidays dedicated more towards thinking about nothing. But, you know what they say about assuming…
The Bread
When we booked the Friday hike to Kalaupapa, the tour group suggested that we bring a snack even though lunch I was provided with the tour, the email stated, “the complementary lunch is just a sandwich, so bring more food for yourself”. So our first line of business was to find a grocery store to purchase some pre-packed food item to supplement our measly promised meal. Assuming (again, we should know not to assume) that would be easy, the first thing we notice is that arriving to Molokai at 8pm feels like arriving at 2am. The island is dark with very few street lights to illuminate the one road that will direct you to Kaunakakai, i.e the “big” town on the island, where 3500 people (i.e about half the total population of the island) and one stop light resides.
We scoured the convenience store for the perfect hiking snack and as our eyes slid up to the top shelf, a man’s head pops up on the other side of the aisle. His eyes appear to glance around and then he practically whispers, “you guys looking for some real good food”?
“um… well…mumble mumble,” it seems like a sketchy offer…stranger danger and all that…..”um maybe”
I mean, of course we want some real good food, but being approached by a stranger in a convenience store… any amount of travel savvy prompts the “no-then find a responsible adult” response to those kinds of offers.
Sensing our reluctancy, he doesn’t push the offer, but provides us with the direction if we decide, we actually want good food instead of pre-packed junk food. “Walk down a block to the second alley, turn left and when you get about halfway down to the darkest part of the alley, turn left, and order yourself some hot bread.”
“um, okay, thanks”. We nod only to appease the stranger.
The hot bread whisperer leaves the convenience store, and we chose our pre-packed junk and walk up to the checkout counter.
We wanted to explore the foretold hot bread, but were visibly apprehensive. We tiptoed down the block to the second alleyway. It was dark, lit by one low watt street lamp. Just enough illumination to cast small shadows from the cockroaches skedaddling across the dirt road.
We find ourselves hunched over, whispering to each other, debating safety and discussing our ultimate demise if we descend into the dark alley…
Is hot bread a real thing or is it tourist bait? As we contemplate all of the possible endings that could come from entering a dark alley way, headlights spin into view and our stomachs clench in fear. A car parked near the ally and we prepared ourselves to be robbed. Instead, three happy-go-lucky ladies laugh as they leave the sedan (leaving the doors unlocked and windows down, by the way), and skip down the alley-way and turn left about halfway down into the darkness.
Feeling sheepish, our backs straightened and we casually began the walk down to not-so-scary-anymore alley.
Surprisingly to us, but not anyone else, we arrived at a wood sided building, with an open order window displaying a menu sign and a handful of tourists waiting for their fresh hot bread ordered to be filled. Harnessing our best acting skills, we acted like we know what we are doing and ordered two hot breads; one with strawberry and cream cheese and the other with cinnamon and butter. We were served two giant round loafs of, indeed delicious as promised by the NOT sketchy , but rather very friendly and helpful gentleman at the convenience store. We later learn that this hot bread is a famous treat on Molokai, and practically everyone knows to get hot bread from Kanemitsu Bakery. This everybody also knows that as the main bakery closes at 2pm on the weekdays, they open a back window specifically just for fresh hot bread from 7:30pm-11pm.
Hot bread gets crazy sometimes! 
Toiling away making some “real good food”
The History
We re-aligned our concepts of island danger it isn’t in the alleyways or anything lurking in the poorly lit town, perhaps the only danger lies in the the cliff side hike to Kalaupapa, the infamous settlement for persons afflicted with hanson’s disease (leprosy).
As a public health professional and travel enthusiast, I am familiar with the story of Molokai as the quarantine island in the late 1890’s. This was the island where Hawaiian’s afflicted with the terrible bacterium, clostridium leprosy, were condemned to live in isolation, pain, and deformity.
However, I assumed, as an already small island, that the whole of it would be the isolation location. But it wasn’t the fact that this swath of land was surrounded completely by water that made it inaccessible, it was the steep cliffs that abruptly jutted from a short, flat peninsula, cutting off this area from even other places on the island. This was something new to me. If you look at the map of the island, it is easy to see a little horn coming out of the north side of the island, right in the center. If you zoomed in on the image, you would see that that horn is a small 7 km swath of fairly flat land, shadowed literally and figuratively by the world’s steepest cliffs, effectively making that bit of land inaccessible.
The story of the settlement for leprosy on Molokai should be a historical story, one with a start date of 1866 followed naturally by an end date. However, the story is not yet finished. Of the more than 8,000 forcibly moved to the peninsula, six affected persons still remain. Today….in 2021. The mandated quarantine was officially lifted in 1969 with the discovery of medications effectively eliminating the possibility of transmission. But the stigma and forced quarantine doesn’t provide a great deal promotion into the re-integration into society, and just like the nearly-empty terminal of the Honolulu airport that serves the visitors heading the Kalaupapa, the Kalaupapa Settlement itself is nearing the end of its story. The settlement remains a town run by these six remaining residents. No one knows when the region will change hands to being fully owned by the National Park system. These residents will wait until they are called to their own final voyage, until then this “not-yet-history” book remains open.
Hiking to history
You are not allowed to visit the settlement without being invited. Two organizations have decided to conduct educational tours of the settlement and if you are able to get them on the phone (their availability seems to be on island time) you can schedule a date to visit, any day except Sunday, and thus become their invited guest.
We scheduled the tour to the settlement with Damien tours on Saturday (Residents of Molokai do not work on Sunday) and opted for the hike down the steep cliffs to meet the tour guide. There are two other options to arrive at the settlement, taking the trail by mule or flying down. I found the idea of the hike to be more intriguing, walking down to history, taking steps down the steepest grade in the world. Steep enough to deem it unclimbable for the souls exiled to the plateau below.
Your chin drops when you visit a place like the Kalaupapa Peninsula. The intense gravitational pull felt by the bottom half of your face is due to two things; the immense history, and the beauty of the steepest cliffs in the world. Standing at the Kalaupapa lookout you can almost envision the boats ferrying over individual pieces of a family. If you close your eyes, you can hear the faint cries of the banished; some young old, very ill, others very young, and others still relatively well. I can’t imagine, the feeling of being forcibly removed from your loved ones, and forced to live a life of solitude. I do my best to appreciate the public health standpoint. This was an illness essentially coming out of nowhere and nothing was known about transmission and infectivity. It was affecting local Hawaiian sat an alarming rate and the tearing apart of families was done with an intention of saving lives. Ignorance can be quite destructive.
The Culture
The next day we booked a waterfall hike at the eastern tip of the island, still an hour’s drive from the center of the island. We were excited to meet the hike guides as they are the true owners of the land we were to visit. Windows down, the islands breath blew gently into our bodies as we steering the car along the soft curves of the coast to Halawa valley. The great family lead by chief Anakala Pilipo Solatorio and son, Greg Solatorio, have been preserving Hawaiian culture for generations and continue to invite visitors to come on a culture walk on the land so that the knowledge is continued to be passed on. Their bright souls emit love and gentleness. Our hike was cancelled that day due to flooding, and while they gave full refund, they stayed with the group for hours, telling us stories of the village, their survival, their music and culture of their ancestors still alive today through their aloha and dedication to the craft.
It was such a contrast story to the one we previously learned in the settlement. And to imagine both of these realities occurring likely without much knowledge of the other, is fascinating.
The Kindness
On the final day we geared up for our remote hike and followed the sing-song voice of our friend, Ms. Apple Maps, gentle directions to where our hike would begin. Normally, we abide by every directive Ms Apple Map expresses, but we stopped the car after we entered a park area and observed the posted sign, right in front of our suggested route, that this road is only suitable only to 4-wheeled drive vehicles. Pondering if our rental sedan would make the journey to a trailhead, we knew, Ms. Apple Maps would not be a helpful respondent to this inquiry, and closed her app.
A truck was parked by waiting for its owner and his two big drooling dogs to return from their running-around-the-park time. When the gentleman returned from his run, we posed our question about vehicle suitability to him and after indicating we should definitely not drive that road, we continued conversing for over an hour. We discussed He was so interesting and thought provoking, conversation came naturally. His aloha spirit and friendliness led to a question of if we would like to hop in his truck and go to a hike that would be better suited for the waning hours of the day.
After quick approving glances at each other, my fiancé and I shook our heads in agreement.
“That would be great”!
We were in for a treat. The flat brown terrain turned to golden rolling hills, lined with red dusted old Jeep trails, and stopped at stunning views of the steepest sea cliffs in the world. We walked along the cliff edge and spotted several blue whales traversing the warm waters between Molokai and Oahu.
As our new friend expressed his need to return to his family and prepare Easter dinner, we exchanged Instagram handles and said our goodbyes.
He excused himself momentarily to make a phone call and my fiancé and I discussed how this has become our favorite afternoon of the trip! The introspective, kind local man, excused himself momentarily to make a phone call and my fiancé and I discussed how this has become our favorite afternoon of the trip! How were we so luck to meet such amazing residents of the indeed-friendly isle? We get a suspicion that the water is filled with aloha here, and the people who live here therefore have 70% aloha water filling their bodies.
Our friend returned with an invite to his home to have Easter dinner with him, his wife, and their three young children. We couldn’t refuse the generous offer. Not only because everything on Molokai is closed on Sunday, (especially Easter Sunday, and were planning on consuming only nut bars for dinner) but because of the incredibly kind offer from this very interesting and openhearted man.
We arrived to their warm, welcoming, and currently-being-renovated home. The kids called us auntie and uncle, common nicknames from children to adults in Hawaiian culture, and told us jokes as we talked and laughed for hours.
We felt like we were home, despite being 4,000 miles from any known relative.
Traveling to an unknown place and feeling so at home was such an incredible gift from this local family. Getting to know people living in the places you travel, really personalizes any travel experience. Molokai has so much to offer and it stems from the people who live there. Filling visitors with mouth-watering local delicacies, leading a steep descent into a current public health exile, talking story about the Hawaiian culture pressing the importance of keeping it alive, and opening your home and heart to newcomers looking for great company and finding a new ohana far from their own.
