Smouldering Hawaii

Old links, new style

A hotel takes pride in its decades-old customs

People don't visit Hawaii's Big Island for the hotels. They go for the volcanoes, the black-lava badlands, the waterfalls, the beaches and the rainbows.

But there's a new chapter in the tale of two hotels.

One, the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, sprawls with 258 rooms on a perfect crescent beach at the northwestern end of the island.

The other, Volcano House, sits with 42 rooms on the lip of the steaming Kilauea Caldera, 4,000 feet above the island's southeastern coast.

One was dreamt up in the 1960s. The other calls itself Hawaii's oldest hotel and counts Mark Twain among its past guests.

One charges a fortune and just turned over a shiny new leaf. The other charges less but is still too much.

And both stand next to natural wonders that are worth stopping by.

Mauna Kea Beach Hotel

Recently, my family stayed at both places and traced a four-day, 220-mile loop around the island. There were three of us — my wife Mary Frances; our 4-year-old daughter Grace; and me.

About 27 miles from the Kona airport, along the resort corridor of the Kohala Coast, we found the spot where the late Laurance Rockefeller plopped the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel.

It opened in 1965, sited at a white-sand beach just below miles of desolate black-lava slopes. From a distance, the building looks like an eight-storey shoe box forgotten between the beach and the resort's golf course.

But wait until you get up close and see the open-air lobby and atria, the scattered pieces of Asian art and the beach views.
If you were rich in the 1960s, this was the place to be.

Affluent families from all over made it an annual destination and clung to its customs, such as the nightly conch call to dinner and the Saturday clambake.

In 2006, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake jolted the hotel into closure. The owners kept the Mauna Kea's exterior but the repair job lasted more than two years as workers enlarged many rooms, reducing the count from 310 to 258.

The hotel reopened in March, with prices ranging from $450 to $1,000 (Dh1,652 to Dh3,672) a night.

We arrived just a few weeks after that, to be welcomed by a sparkling setting and gracious staff. There's a spa and fitness centre, 11 tennis courts, a new golf clubhouse and restaurant. The conch and the clambakes survived the transition.

The beach — officially, Kaunaoa Beach — is reef-protected and palm-fringed, ideal for wading and bodysurfing.

Forced upgrade

I had booked the cheapest room (a 400-square-foot mountain-view unit for $409, or Dh1,502). But we were upgraded to a deluxe seventh-floor ocean-view room ($850, or Dh3,121).

Assuming I had been detected as a travel writer despite my efforts to travel incognito, I turned down the upgrade. But to no avail. Later, I found out the upgrade had nothing to do with my job.

We took the fancy room: 615 square feet, big balcony, beach view, nifty flat-screen media console wall, walk-in closet and a large bathroom with its own balcony.

The Mauna Kea is not paradise. Although the food was good, servers apologised during a long wait for my seared ahi dinner at Manta and again as we waited for lunch at the Hau Tree café the next day.

When you're travelling with a 4-year-old and paying $25 (Dh91) per waking hour for your stay, this does not go down easily.

But it doesn't have to be a deal breaker. If the Mauna Kea staff can get so many other things right, they can solve their kitchen-service issues.

Hotel on volcano edge

By Christopher Reynolds

This 1941 building draws life from fire

We headed to the southeastern end of Big Island and climbed 4,000 feet above sea level to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, where Kilauea smoulders and the Volcano House struggles.

The easy way to see the volcano's fuming Halemaumau Crater is from the rim-top Jaggar Museum or to drive down Chain of Craters Road for a view of rising fumes as lava spills into the sea.

If you want the closest view of that lava striking the sea, drive for an hour from the park entrance to a viewing area at the end of Hawaii Highway 130 near Kalapana. Visitors can arrive from 5-8pm and should leave by 10pm.

We went a few miles down Crater Rim Drive from the park entrance and Volcano House and strolled a few hundred feet through the Thurston Lava Tube and took the Kilauea Iki trail, a 4-mile loop that drops 400 feet to the caldera floor.

This gave us an exhilarating chance to creep across hard black lava like ants in a soup bowl, drawing near — but not too near — the steaming vents.

The Volcano House, perched on the crater rim, is mostly a 1941 building, two storeys, wooden siding painted red, with black-rock columns and retaining walls. But the enterprise dates to the mid-19th century.

In June 1866, when Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) came on horseback, there were four rooms and the going rate was $4 (Dh14) a night.

Pleasant surprise

Clemens stayed for many days and filed a story for the Sacramento Daily Union, noting that “the surprise of finding a good hotel in such an outlandish spot startled me considerably more than the volcano did''.

The Volcano House grew. In 1935, a Ripley's Believe It or Not! cartoon depicted the lobby's stone fireplace had been blazing unabated for 61 years. Then in 1940, a kitchen fire burnt down the building.

If the official story is to be believed, firefighters doused the building fire but somebody saved burning embers from the fireplace and carried them elsewhere for safekeeping. After the hotel was rebuilt, the embers were returned in 1941.

On the night of our arrival, we read Grace a bedtime story in the glow of the supposedly everlasting embers. I tried to visualise those firefighters, knocking down flames on one side while protecting them on other.

I suggest a walk to the neighbouring Volcano Art Centre. From 1877 to 1921, this wooden building was the Volcano House but the structure and its exposed ohia wood beams were shouldered aside during the expansion.

It is believed that the brick fireplace is where the everlasting embers spent their hiatus. The building was restored in the 1970s and thrives as a gallery, full of paintings, photos, jewellery and carvings.

We made it our last stop in the park before we headed out to chase rainbows.

— Los Angeles Times- Washington Post News Service

Value for money

If you want to spend less than $200 (Dh734) a night on Hawaii's Big Island and prefer inns to big resorts, try the Waimea Garden Cottage (in the northern town of Waimea, aka Kamuela) or the Kilauea Lodge (in the southern village of Volcano).

Waimea Gardens Cottage is located on a grassy creekside site. Waimea is an old cowboy town where restaurants such as Merriman's and Daniel Thiebaut win praise for sophisticated use of island ingredients; and the beaches of the Kohala Coast are 15 minutes' drive away.

Each unit is stocked with breakfast ingredients. Credit cards are not accepted but guests can pay through PayPal or with cheques. Prices from $150 to $180 (Dh550 to Dh661) per night. Visit www.waimeagardens.com for details.

Kilauea Lodge is a 1938 Young Men's Christian Association camp headquarters, which has been converted and expanded into a 12-unit inn.

It stands on 10 acres of grass among a handful of inns, shops and restaurants just outside the entrance to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

There are no crater views but the well-appointed rooms make it more than a fair bargain. The restaurant serves breakfast, dinner and a big Sunday brunch.

Prices from $170 to $185 (Dh624 to Dh679), breakfast included. Two cottages ($200 to $220, or Dh734 to Dh807) are also available nearby. Visit www.kilauealodge.com for details.

Go There . . . Big Island . . . From the UAE

Kona is the closest airport.

Delta flies daily via Los Angeles. Fare from Dh8,325

United Airlines flies daily via Washington and Los Angeles or San Francisco. Fare from Dh7,755

— Information courtesy: The Holiday Lounge by Dnata. Ph: 04 4380454