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Most island visitors prefer Scotch or martinis. After soaping off the Coppertone, they generally settle for dinner and dreams. For the indefatigable, however, there is nightlife on Maui. There are waiting lines outside the Lost Horizon disco at the Wailea Beach Hotel; the Royal Lahaina's Foxy Lady packs in upper teenagers and the Tommy Dorsey set in equal numbers. The island's hottest spot is the Bluemax, in the town of Lahaina, where visiting Elton John and Linda Ronstadt have done their stuff off the cuff; the place is packed nightly in hopes that other drop-in stars may relieve the resident combo.
Indeed, by night or day, the island's fun-and-games fulcrum is Lahaina (pronounced La-high-nah), a one-street, six-block town with the raffish aura of Virginia City cum Tijuana. Once the playground of Hawaiian royalty, and later in the 19th century a major port for whaling ships and China clippers, the clapboard community has been restored to a state of authentic tackiness. La haina boasts some 30 restaurants and about 260 stores whose offerings range from elegant scrimshaw and touristy puka-shell necklaces to T shirts with slogans like DON'T HASSLE THE HUMPBACKS, MAUI NO KA Ol (Maui is the best) and HERE TODAY GONE TO MAUI. On the town's bustling waterfront, tourists cram aboard the 50-ft. trimaran Trilogy for daylong sails, or the 65-ft. glass-bottomed boat Coral See.
Later this year the Lahaina Restoration Foundation will have almost totally rebuilt Carthaginian II (named for the fictional vessel in James Michener's Hawaii), which will be a true replica of a 19th century trader. One of the foundation's major enterprises is a marine research center which is trying to preserve the endangered humpbacks, of which there are perhaps only 850 left. (By dialing 667-9316 you can hear them "singing.") The foundation has also restored to Victorian primness the home of the Baldwin family, pioneer missionaries and landowners of whom the natives still say: "They came here to do good and did right well." Near by, Baldwin ghosts may note with horror, aging flower children —"bamboo tourists"—dicker for Maui Wowie. Thanks to the tourist boom, Lahaina today has three times as many permanent inhabitants (some 10,000) as it did in the 1840s, whaling's heyday.
Not least among the island's beauties are its beauties. Maui boasts some of the world's most exotic women. Many flashing-eyed, sinuous wahines are hapa-haole, meaning half Caucasian; others are apparently products of every conceivable ethnic mix. Of the larger islands Maui has the state's biggest proportion of Polynesian-descended Hawaiians and part
Hawaiians (26.3%), though they are slightly outnumbered by islanders of Japanese origin (26.4%); the other major non-Caucasian strain is Filipino (17%), followed by Chinese and Korean. Thus while Hawaiian, a melodious language that the missionaries alphabetized into a mere twelve characters, is still spoken and sung on the island, many natives converse in pidgin English, the world's most colorful lingua franca. A dark-hued hotel waiter, cussed out by an irate Texan who has received the soup in his lap, retorts: "Eh, now, no take out on me, you stupid buggah! Udderwise bimeby I gone broke your head in small tiny pieces."