(4 of 4)
House of Happy Talk. Kauai ("The Garden Island") likes to think it has best safeguarded the ancient Hawaiian traditions of hospitality. The "Aloha spirit" has been adulterated on bustling Waikiki with too many cheap grass skirts and plastic leis. But it still thrives on Kauai, where farmers tend their lush taro patches and fish with nets from the reefs much as their forefathers did. Local boys and girls mingle with the young crowd of guests in the Prince Kuhio piano bar of the new Kauai Surf, at Kalapaki Bay, whe ~e the waves come in just right for beginning surfers.
Local color—real and synthetic—is everywhere on Kauai. At the Coco Palms, surrounded by Hawaii's largest coconut orchard, conch shells are sounded each evening, while runners race through the darkened groves, whirling their flaming torches and lighting up flares, just as they did in the courts of the alii (chieftains). The Hanalei Plantation (opposite), which includes a 20th Century Fox set designer's re-creation of a Hawaiian monarch's palace, overlooks the beach where Mitzi Gaynor washed that man right outa her hair in South Pacific. Owner Lyle Guslander, who has built hotels on all three of the major Neighbor Islands, insists that every employee learn the name of every guest. Evenings in its House of Happy Talk lounge are apt to turn into one big Hawaiian house party.
But the real thrill is to leave civilization altogether. One of the best points of departure is Hanalei; from there Kauai helicopters (for a fee of $100 an hour) take picnickers or sightseers to visit the two-thirds of the island that is accessible no other way: the rim of the crater of long-dead Mount Waia-leale (with 400 to 800 inches of rain a year, the wettest spot on earth), the hidden beaches like Honopu and the Valley of the Lost Tribe on the Na Pali coast, populated today only by prancing mountain goats. Said Jackie, after she had picnicked at one of Kauai's inaccessible beaches hemmed by steep lava cliffs: "I had forgotten—and my children had never known—what it is like to discover a new place, unwatched and unnoticed."
-Easy way to win a bet: ask which are the southernmost, northernmost, westernmost and easternmost states. Answers: Hawaii, Alaska, Alaska—and Alaska, which is easternmost because it crosses the 180th meridian.