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Exploring Burial Caves. To accommodate visitors new luxury hotels are also proliferating in the Neighbor Islands. Empress of the group is Laurance Rockefeller's $15 million Mauna Kea on Hawaii. Among its attractions: rooms and promenades full of Polynesian wood carvings, inner courtyards luxuriant with bamboo, hibiscus and banana trees, plus exclusive rights to canter over the Parker ranch with jovial Hawaiian paniolas (cowboys) and a challenging 18-hole $2,000,000 golf course. Since its opening in July, 1965, Mauna Kea has been virtually S.R.O. It is raising its rates this month to $51 and $65 for a double, including two meals a day.
Some 35 miles farther south on Hawaii is Johno Jackson's isolated plush-primitive Kona Village, three months old. Jackson is a World War II P-51 pilot and California oil millionaire who delights in spinning tales of ancient Hawaii for his guests, offers them skin diving, sunfish sailing, and trips in his Jeep across the cinder beds and lava fields to explore ancient native burial caves. In the sleepy village of Kailua-Kona, close to some of the most exciting fishing grounds of the world (bonefish, blue marlin, Ahi and the jack crevalle), the venerable Kona Inn and the newer (1960) King Kamehameha are being joined by a $4,000,000 Kona Hilton, due to be finished in December 1967. The Bishop Estate (which owns 9% of the land in the state) has nearly finished the first of two 18-hole golf courses, part of a planned $47 million resort hotel development just south of Kailua-Kona, which will locate 3,000 rooms around protected, man-made beaches.
Cavorting Whales. On Maui, known as "The Valley Isle," mangoes, papaya and passion fruit on the roadside wait to be plucked by the passing traveler. The newest and best resort hotels are going up along a peerless, three-mile stretch of white beach on the southwestern side of the Kaanapali area, where the low-slung Royal Lahaina, the Royal Kaanapali and the towering Sheraton-Maui, built on a lava rock outcropping, together share a $1,800,000 golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones and blasted out of the slopes of Mount Puu Kukui. A $6,000,000 Hale Kaanapali Hilton condominium will open near by in February, to be followed by a 3,300-room hotel development built by Amfac, Inc., one of Hawaii's great factoring combines.
Only a 15-minute drive from Kaanapali is the 19th century town of Lahaina, capital of Hawaii in the days of King Kamehameha III (1833-54) and a brawling happy-go-lucky port of call for whaling fleets. Under a $1,600,000 state grant, Lahaina's old palaces and prisons, missionary homes and hospitals are being restored into a sort of Polynesian Williamsburg. Tourists can cruise offshore in the 53-ft. schooner The Allure and, in wintertime, watch the herds of 50-ft.-long humpback and lob-tail whales that frolic and cavort with their calves as close as 150 ft. from shore.