Grab your shades, wax your board, and check out our tropical—paradise smackdown, in which we scour the Aloha State’s sweetest shorelines, lushest mountains, coolest adventures, choicest chow, and hippest nightlife—then we let you decide which island is the big kahuna of beach-bound delight.


By Amy Linn


By Kent Black


By Ethan Watters


By Joe Kane


By Alex Heard


By Daniel Duane

Getting There: Major carriers offer nonstop flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Honolulu, Oahu, Kahului, Maui, and Lihue, Kauai—home to Hawaii’s largest airports—for sometimes as low as $370 round-trip. Hawaiian (800-367-5320, ) and Aloha (800-367-5250, ) airlines serve many smaller cities along the West Coast—including Portland, Seattle, Oakland, Orange County, and San Diego—and fly nonstop routes to the Honolulu, Kahului, and Big Island’s Kona airport, starting at about $400. Once you’re there, Island Air (800-323-3345, ) offers shuttle service between the six major islands, from $86 one way.

Resources: Visit for a photographic catalog of many of the islands’ best beaches; check out , the Web site of Hawaii’s tourism board. For the best maps, pick up a copy of Atlas of Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, $50).

Wild Thing

Give in to temptation and go feral

SHORTLY AFTER LANDING IN KAUAI—the island air like a balm, the route north flanked by soft beaches, the impossibly green mountains poking through the mist—I can’t help but notice all the chickens crossing the road. Cattle egrets, red-footed boobies, and a lot of surfer dudes, I expected. But chickens?

“They’re everywhere, man,” says the smoothie maker at Banana Joe’s Fruit Stand, near Kilauea, as he hands over a to-die-for blend of locally grown papayas, bananas, and pineapples. “Chickens, goats, cows, pigs—they all went wild here.”

What he didn’t add was this: “Everything does.” It’s Kauai’s mojo, it’s the cosmic undertow, it’s the bizarre unseen force here that somehow invades your synapses and returns you to a state of primordial bliss. Centuries ago, Polynesians introduced moa (chickens) to the Garden Island, as Kauai is called, and now the cluckers are everywhere, bold and cocky in the sheer delight of shedding their domesticity.

For me, the shedding takes about a day. By the time I wake up to aloha music in the sweet oceanfront condo at the Hanalei Colony Resort, in Haena—just up the road from Hanalei, the north shore’s epicenter of surfing, biking, kayaking, coffeehouses, and barefoot locals—I’ve already lost it.

How else to explain the sudden urge to get in a helicopter, when in normal life I can barely sit on a swing without Dramamine?

“Loook at zee waterfalls!” croons Maurice, the Brazilian-born chopper pilot for Heli USA, after liftoff from the tiny Princeville airport, a few miles east of Hanalei. “Zo many, you can’t count!” We buzz deep into the untouched interior—about 90 percent of Kauai is inaccessible by road—where clouds snag on volcanic cliffs and rivers spout spontaneously above the rainforest.

We ride the spine of Mount Waialeale, one of the soggiest places on the planet, which divides the island’s arid west from its moist, lush north. We hover over the Alakai Swamp, a rainforest that’s home to wild boar and some of the world’s rarest plants. We swoop into 12-mile-long, 3,567-foot-deep Waimea Canyon (the “Grand Canyon of the Pacific”), and then head north to the sublime Na Pali Coast. Jungly 3,000-foot spires rise like buttresses on an earthly cathedral, and the 11-mile Kalalau Trail—famed for its Pacific views—hugs the cliffs above the pounding surf. Nothing could be mo’ betta—until it is. A rainbow circles us: not just an arch but an entire, brilliant ring of color. Is this even possible?

On Kauai, the answer is yes—and then some. It’s the oldest of Hawaii’s main islands (dating back about six million years), so crashing waves have had time to create more than 50 miles of beaches—more sand per mile of coastline than on any island in the state. And with less than half as many visitors as Maui and none of the massive condo clots, traffic jams, and high-rises, a low-crowd shoreline is a fact of life.

I drive to Secret Beach, a lovely half-mile-long haven of white sand near the Kilauea Lighthouse, and Anini Beach, where the exposed reef draws summer snorkelers. I check out Hanalei Bay, a rapturous crescent of coastline framed by the cliffs of Mount Makana. I swim at Tunnels Beach and Kee Beach, and each new strand tempts me to explore another. There’s no question that this is as good as Hawaii gets.

Even when it rains.

On a stormy north-shore day, I take the coast road to the sunny south, music blaring from the radio like the soundtrack to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen—which happens to be my life at the moment. In bustling, resort-filled Poipu, I snorkel with sea turtles at Hoai Beach, then it’s onward to the 1920s-era Waimea Plantation Cottages, a banyan-treed beachfront oasis in the tiny outpost of Waimea. It’s not easy to leave after a lomi lomi massage at the resort’s spa, a mai tai at its brewpub (to the tunes of Ambrose, the seventy-something ukulele player), and an ono taco at the Shrimp Station, in town, but there’s more exploring to be done.

A long, jolting drive down a rutted road brings me to Polihale Beach, 15 spectacular miles of sand on the far western edge of the Na Pali cliffs, with only ten other people in sight. When I park near the dunes, I hear what sounds like a goat bleating beyond the vast surrounding sugarcane fields, which can’t be right—there’s no farm in sight. And then I remember: It’s wild.

Access & Resources
Hole Up: Hanalei Colony Resort’s spacious condo living, on the North Shore, is the closest lodging to the Na Pali Coast. It’s totally unplugged (no TV or phone) and right on the beach. Two-bedroom condos from $210; 808-826-6235, » Whaler’s Cove, in Poipu, offers oceanfront luxury with its glass, marble, and private-terrace condos. Hot tubs and full kitchens (complete with blenders) round out the swank. Doubles from $349; 800-225-2683, » The gorgeously restored 1920s-era Waimea Plantation Cottages sit amid banyan trees and coco palms on a black-sand beach on Kauai’s remote western side. Hawaiian-style massages ($80 and up; 808-338-2240, ) at the on-site spa are amazing. Doubles from $195; 800-992-4632,

Dine: For a quick and delicious breakfast, try the Hanalei Wake-Up Cafe, the north-coast locals’ hole-in-the-wall favorite. It closes at 11 a.m. so employees can go surfing. 808-826-5551 » Sit under the thatched veranda at Hanalei Bay Resort’s Bali Hai restaurant, overlooking the water and Mount Makana. 808-826-6522, » When you’re ready to splurge, the torchlit, tiki-chic Plantation Gardens, in the Kiahuna Plantation Resort, in Poipu, is famous for dishes made with locally grown produce. 808-742-2216,

Get Out: Hike the steep and strenuous, sometimes muddy, and always gorgeous Kalalau Trail, on the Na Pali Coast. Camping permits are available from the Division of State Parks. 808-274-3444, » Rent a kayak or take a guided tour of Hanalei Bay with Kayak Kauai, in Hanalei. From $28; 800-437-3507, » Head out on horseback across 400-acre Silver Falls Ranch, in Kilauea, to a waterfall pool where you can take a dip and eat a picnic lunch. $100; 808-828-6718, » On the south shore, swim and lounge at Mahaulepu Beach, three miles east of the Hyatt Regency in Poipu. The draw? Two miles of unspoiled dunes and golden sand.

Shop: Check out Aunty Lilikoi’s award-winning passion-fruit sauces in Waimea. 866-545-4564,

Hot Spot

With volcanic rivers of free-flowing lava, this island’s on fire

Big Island

Kilauea Volcano, on the Big Island’s southeast coast, active since 1983

MY FIRST THOUGHT UPON SEEING the torch-bearing shapes of Ka huakai o ka po (“Night Marchers”)—ghosts of past Hawaiian warriors—was that they were hallucinations caused by staring too long at the 2,000-degree flow of fiery red lava from the Puu Oo vent, on Kilauea. I’d driven to the end of Chain of Craters Road and hiked a couple hours over sneaker-shredding aa, or lava rock, to witness the spectacle. A couple dozen hikers and I stood half a mile away from where the ominously glowing molten river hit the ocean in an explosion of steam and rock. It was like watching the beating heart of the Big Island: land so new it’s still in the process of creation. Indeed, Kilauea has been erupting continuously since 1983.

Earlier that day, I’d sat on the cliffs overlooking the rocky shore at South Point, the southernmost spot in the United States and thought to be the place where the first Polynesians landed on the Hawaiian chain, about 1,600 years ago. I tried to imagine how those first settlers, after a 2,300-mile voyage from the Marquesas, saw the island: its green- and black-sand beaches, fuming volcanoes, dense, highland forests, snow-covered mountaintops, and lush, windward valleys.

Since the Big Island is the original Hawaiian homeland, it’s where many of the gods, goddesses, and demigods live and are revered even today. It seems there’s not an acre of land that doesn’t have a story and a hefty dose of mana, or spiritual power. I went horseback-riding in the Waipio Valley, on the northeast coast, where Uli, goddess of sorcery, and Nenewe, the evil shark-man, reside. I trekked to the top of 13,796-foot Mauna Kea, past Lake Waiau, where ancient Hawaiians brought the umbilical cords of their children to give them the strength of the mountains. I spent two days hiking a few of the 150-plus miles of trails in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, including a great six-and-a-half-mile hike to the steaming Halemaumau crater, home to Pele, goddess of fire and volcanoes.

Hawaiian myth holds that when the Big Island was being created, Pele and her lover, Kamapuaa (the pig god), quarreled, and in the split they divided the island. The pig god took the rainier windward side, while Pele got hot and dry Kona, on the west coast. But the fact that Mauna Loa and Kilauea are still active is evidence that Pele hasn’t gotten over the breakup. Fortunately, she can be bribed. Gifts of leis or bottles of booze are offered at Halemaumau, and locals around Puna will tell you in all earnestness that if you see an old lady hitchhiking near a volcano, give her a lift: She could be Pele in disguise.

While there are plenty of mana-free things to do on the Big Island—snorkeling and scuba diving in Kealakekua Bay, on the Kona coast; swimming with manta rays; sportfishing for marlin, swordfish, and tuna; whale watching off Kona; mountain-biking the upcountry ranch land outside of Waimea—I always find myself drawn to those places that connect the old Hawaii with the new.

Which brings me back to my dilemma on the aa path near the Kilauea flow. To show proper obeisance when encountering Night Marchers, it is customary to remove all clothes and lie facedown until they pass. Before I could oblige, however, they emerged from the mist: five Japanese teenagers in matching rock-tour T-shirts, armed with flashlights. Seeing my shocked expression, they giggled nervously and moved on. A few minutes later, I stumbled on the sharp rock and gashed my leg. As I limped in the dark, back to where I’d left my car, I began to wonder if those Japanese kids weren’t Night Marchers in disguise who’d cursed me for not showing the proper respect.

On the Big Island, you never know.

Access & Resources
Hole Up: Waianuhea, near the northeastern town of Honokaa, is a stunning five-room, off-the-grid B&B, 15 minutes inland from the Hamakua Coast. It’s the perfect base for exploring the Waipio Valley and the up-country ranch town of Waimea. Doubles from $190; 888-775-2577, » In Kona, on the island’s sunny west coast, is the Sheraton Keauhou Bay Resort & Spa, with 500-plus rooms on 22 oceanfront acres, plus meandering pools, grottoes, and water slides. Doubles from $169; 808-930-4900, » Just outside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in the southeast, Volcano Rainforest Retreat has four cedar and redwood cottages and three hot tubs—perfect after a day spent wandering the lava flows and craters. In addition to boning up on volcanology, you can get an in-cottage shiatsu massage. Doubles from $125; 800-550-8696,

Dine: Tex Drive In, on Highway 19 in Honokaa, specializes in addictive fried pastries called malasadas—try the pineapple-and-papaya filling. 808-775-0598, » If Hawaiian doughnuts don’t cut it, the French-Asian Daniel Thiebaut Restaurant, in Waimea, is one of the top-rated eateries in the United States. Don’t miss the Asian crab–crusted mahi-mahi with sweet-chili butter sauce. 808-887-2200, » Kaaloa’s Super J’s take-out, on Highway 11 in Honaunau, serves true-blue Hawaiian dishes like kalua pig and lomi salmon. 808-328-9566

Get Out: Swim offshore with gentle manta rays and guide James Wing, the original manta man. Wing is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of manta behavior and for providing close encounters. From $75; 808-987-8660, » Captain Ron, of Kailua-Kona–based Coral Reef Divers, will run you up the coast to dive sites like Pyramid Pinnacle and Golden Arches. Two-tank dive, $95; 808-987-1584, » You’ll need at least two days to explore the Kilauea Caldera and the 150-plus miles of hiking trails in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park; call the eruption hotline for details on Kilauea’s lava flow. 808-985-6000, » Hawaii Forest & Trail leads driving excursions and guided hikes to the ever-changing lava flow. $145; 800-464-1993, » Ahalanui Beach Park—on the Puna coast, south of Hilo—features a 90-degree spring-fed geothermic pool. 808-961-8311 » At the bottom of a steep, switchbacking road on the northeast coast, lush Waipio Valley is perfect for hiking, riding horses, and exploring the black-sand beach. Ride the rim with Waipio Ridge Stables before venturing to a waterfall in the rainforest. $145; 877-757-1414,

Shop: Mid-Pacific Store, in Hilo, sells vintage aloha shirts, kimonos, and muumuus. 808-935-3822 » Coffee connoisseurs know that Kona coffee is a smooth, subtle, light-to-medium bean originally from Guatemala. Get your fix on a plantation tour at Kona Blue Sky Coffee, in Holualoa—it’s one of the few places that offer 100 percent Kona beans. 877-322-1700,

Luxe Outpost

Mellow never had it so good

Lanai

Going nowhere fast: fat-tire riding, Lanai

I WAS IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS at twilight when the feeling first came over me. From Lanai’s only town, I had driven half an hour north on a single-lane dirt road to this otherworldly plateau of red dust, pinnacles, and encrusted lava. I turned off the engine of the jeep but left the radio blaring rock from a Big Island station. Walking away from the car—at just the point where the trade winds began to drown out the electric guitar—I felt suddenly and deliriously alone.

Like many city dwellers, I fantasize about being stranded on a Pacific island. I read Robinson Crusoe as a kid and saw Cast Away the day it opened, but I’d never experienced the exquisite ache of loneliness that a shipwreck survivor might feel until that moment, standing at the northern edge of Lanai and looking out at the darkening ocean. Of course, this was an illusion. When I turned around, my jeep was there, with the Stone Temple Pilots singing an anthem to modern-day alienation. But all was not lost: I was still on Lanai.

Shaped like a teardrop, 18 miles long, and only 13 miles across at its widest point, Lanai has retained a sense of splendid seclusion. No theme-park resorts here. In fact, since the island was once used for growing pineapples and cattle ranching—and 98 percent of it is owned by a single real estate holding—development has been kept to a minimum. Lanai City, with a population of just 3,000, is tightly contained in less than four square miles and still looks like the 1920s pineapple-plantation village it used to be. About half of the island’s coast is sheer cliff against ocean, and most of the land is arid—red dirt and low grass. There are less than three dozen miles of paved road, not a single mile of which runs along the coastline; nearly all shore access is by jeep trail, hiking, or rappelling. From almost any place on the island, I had to walk only 15 minutes and I could be deep in my thousands-of-miles-from-civilization reverie.

The illusion of utter isolation is a delicacy, but like ordering blowfish at a sushi bar, it’s one you want carefully served with the poison excised. Which is to say that the thrill of feeling stranded can sometimes lead to restlessness if you don’t have an ultra-luxe hotel to head back to at the end of the day.

Fortunately, Lanai has two such retreats. The low, Mediterranean-style buildings of the Manele Bay Hotel are terraced into a hillside next to the island’s nicest strand, Hulopoe Beach. The most decadent suites—outfitted with four-poster beds—come with butler service, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that, back in the early nineties, Bill Gates had rented the entire place for his wedding. Ten miles away, close to town, the Lodge at Koele, with its old-world hunting-estate decor, is an oddity in Hawaii. Because it’s situated at 1,700 feet in the island’s center, breezes are often cool enough to warrant use of the lobby’s wood-burning fireplace. Both resorts have golf courses that are so well manicured and cleverly designed, with ocean backdrops and island greens, that they look like the virtual landscapes in a golf video game.

What I like best about Lanai is that it manages a perfect balance between what there is to do and what there isn’t. Sure, you can hook up with scuba and fishing charters, sample world-class snorkeling off Shipwreck Beach (so named because a World War II Liberty Ship rusts on the reef), sea-kayak with pods of spinner dolphins in Kaunolu Bay, mountain-bike down the Munro Trail, and ride horses above Maunalei Gulch. But karaoke nightclubs and beachfront bacchanalias? If you use party as a verb, this is not your island.

In the end, your choices come down to a happily manageable handful: Should I play croquet or visit the sporting-clay facility to blow some plates out of the sky? Should I take a jeep down that dirt road or rent a mountain bike and go exploring? Should I get the alii banana-and-coconut scrub or the ki pola hoolu ti leaf wrap?

Still want more? Take your day planner and head for Maui.

Access & Resources
Hole Up: The 249-room, Mediterranean-style Manele Bay Hotel is the only resort on the water. Its spacious rooms open onto garden courtyards or overlook Hulopoe Beach, the island’s best. Doubles from $400; 800-450-3704, » If you’re into fetishizing the lifestyle of English lords and ladies, the 102-room Lodge at Koele, just north of Lanai City, is perfection. The largest wooden structure in the islands, it’s modeled after old English hunting lodges, with a full croquet course and pros to teach you the game. Doubles from $400; 800-450-3704, » The oldest and most low-key of the island’s accommodations is the 11-room Hotel Lanai, on the edge of Lanai City. Built by pineapple king James Dole in 1923 to house his execs, the plantation-style rooms have a warm charm. Doubles from $105; 877-665-2624,

Dine: The Blue Ginger Café; is a casual local favorite just across the street from Dole Park, in the center of Lanai City. Eat there two days in a row and you’re likely to see the same friendly faces. 808-565-6363 » Henry Clay’s Rotisserie, in the Hotel Lanai, serves hearty New Orleans fare at moderate prices. The small bar here is one of the few places where locals and visitors mingle. 877-665-2624

Get Out: Trilogy Ocean Sports Lanai is the catchall guiding service on the island. It leads catamaran-supported scuba dives to the walls and reefs below Lanai’s rocky shores, rents jeeps to explore the island’s mostly dirt roads, and arranges guided four-wheel-drive expeditions if you don’t want to go it alone. Prices vary; 888-628-4800, » Thanks to the cliffs that cover nearly half of Lanai’s 47-mile coastline, access to many beaches requires a hike or four-wheel drive. There is one notable exception: Hulopoe Beach, at the south end of Route 440, is not only car-accessible; it’s continually rated as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. On the west end of the beach, the Manele Bay Hotel keeps a stash of snorkel equipment in a kiosk for its guests. » Blast a couple of clay pigeons at the Lodge at Koele’s sport-shooting facility. $150 for 100 rounds; 808-559-4600,

Shop: The Heart of Lanai art gallery sells island paintings by local artists and custom-made ukuleles. 888-565-7815

Real Aloha

Your ticket to the land of big cliffs and big hearts

MOLOKAI IS THE WILDEST and most mysterious of the Hawaiian Islands—sparsely settled, sporadically visited, fiercely independent, and protected by the world’s highest sea cliffs. There are no stoplights here; in fact, with Big Pineapple long gone and Big Condo not quite arrived, there are hardly any lights at all. Viewed at night from nearby Maui, Molokai looms like a wary hulk guarding a secret. And it is—Molokai is the Hawaii that used to be.

Molokai’s only real town, Kaunakakai, is three blocks long. The shops’ floorboards creak with age, but the place has a funky charm—it’s where the Joads would have washed up if they’d put in to the Pacific and had better luck. My first night “downtown,” locals were gathered in front of the library, talking in pidgin and English and cheering wildly when guitarist Zack Helm and his daughter, Raiatea, lit up the night with traditional Hawaiian songs. I was the odd white face in a sea of Filipino, Japanese, and Polynesian blood, but people greeted me with smiles and nods.

Molokai is called the Friendly Isle, but that’s overly simplistic. Perhaps it’s more accurate to call it the most Hawaiian of the major islands—almost half its 7,000 inhabitants are natives, and the island is known for the virtue of ohana, or family. “If you want to make a lot of money, go to Oahu,” a Molokai resident named Joe Kalipi told me. “Here, you judge a man by his aloha spirit. You judge him by his heart.”

Wander into a homey little roadside cookhouse, lured by visions of guava-sauce ribs and a cold beer, only to discover that it doesn’t have an alcohol license? Not to worry. The waiter will likely offer you the last frosty Bud from his personal stash. And because there are far fewer people to crowd the beaches of Molokai, you won’t find any of the competitive surf vibes of the other islands. The day I boogie-boarded off Kepuhi Beach, a popular swimming and surfing spot on the west side, three young locals paddled over to warn me away from hidden rocks and suggested I’d get better rides if I moved up on my board.

All this packed into an island 38 miles long and ten wide. Though it’s the second smallest of the major Hawaiian islands, Molokai’s sheer wildness and diversity is unparalleled. The rainforest atop its steep northern shore receives nearly 160 inches of precipitation annually. Laau Point, a few miles west, gets fewer than ten inches. Try making that transition on a mountain bike: Start atop a 2,000-foot cliff that drops straight into the Pacific and finish by hurtling to the sea along red-desert singletrack so thrilling it explains why Molokai is called Mini-Moab.

For an offshore perspective, sea-kayak the south coast, which is protected by the state’s longest barrier reef, stretching almost the entire length of the island’s southern side. Stuff a picnic lunch and snorkeling gear into your pack and find a perfect white-sand beach, like three-mile Papohaku (the state’s longest), to call your own.

After all, you’ve come to Molokai to be alone. Up in the high country there are at least a dozen forested hiking trails you’ll almost surely have to yourself. (Beware, however, that some cross private property and can’t be accessed without a local guide.) All are dramatic, but my favorite is the cliff-face descent via 26 posted switchbacks into the leper colony at Kalaupapa, on the island’s north shore, a setting so spectacular—with a story of such tragedy and courage—that it inspired the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London.

Spectacular, isolated, ignored, unique: This is Molokai. The island’s residents prefer it that way. They might mumble something about too many visitors, but the next thing you know, they’re inviting you home for dinner, giving you their last beer, or helping you catch a wave. Now that’s a friendly isle.

Access & Resources
Hole Up: Relaxed but lively, the Polynesian-style Hotel Molokai has 47 thatch-roofed rooms and an ocean-view restaurant and bar that attracts visitors and locals alike. Doubles from $90; 800-535-0085, » The Lodge at Molokai Ranch—the island’s only resort—is a gorgeous plantation-style estate with 22 rooms on 65,000 acres on the western third of the island. Doubles from $280; 888-627-8082,

Dine: Molokai isn’t known for haute cuisine, but you can eat cheaply and well; ribs and fresh fish are the island specialties. Good bets are Kualapuu Cookhouse (808-567-9655) and the Molokai Pizza Café; (808-553-3288), in Kaunakakai. » Stanley’s Coffee Shop, on Puali Street, in Kaunakakai, has Internet access and espresso. 808-553-9966 » The Neighborhood Store and Counter, on the Kamehameha Highway, will sell you a Japanese-style box lunch for a day trip to the remote eastern beaches. 808-558-8498

Get Out: Hook up with Damien Tours for the 3.1-mile trek down the treacherously steep Pali Trail to the Kalaupapa leper colony, a national historic site that’s still home to 35 people. At the bottom, board the bus driven by Richard Marks—a wry resident and a fierce advocate for the victims of the widely misunderstood disease. $40; 808-567-6171 » Mountain-bike with Activities Maunaloa on the world-class singletrack at the Lodge at Molokai Ranch. Head guide and native son Kawika Puaa leads half-day rides through the wildly varied terrain, from muddy rainforest to hardpack desert. $45; 808-552-0184 » For fishing, scuba diving, and one of the few available tours of the spectacular north shore (accessible only by boat), Walter Naki, of Molokai Action ºÚÁϳԹÏÍøs, is your man. $100; 808-558-8184

Shop: The Plantation Gallery, on Maunaloa’s main drag, has the best beads and trinkets on Molokai—and maybe in the whole state. Check out its sister shop, the Big Wind Kite Factory, next door. 808-552-2364, ,

Blue Diamond

North Shore surf plus Honolulu nightlife—proof that you can have it all

I GET IRRITATED WHEN PEOPLE disrespect Oahu—letting you know, smugly, that when they travel to Hawaii, all they do in Honolulu is catch a flight to one of the “other islands.” The rap is that Oahu is too urban, too touristy, too whatever. The great abomination is supposedly Waikiki, the 1.5-mile-long resort-and-beach strip just east of downtown Honolulu whose loud garishness represents everything modern island travelers think they ought to avoid.

These gripes miss a larger truth: Oahu’s many parts, both kitschy and genuine, come together to form a wonderful whole. There’s more than enough nature, outdoor sports, beaches, mountains, and solitude to please anyone, and Oahu’s urban life is a strength, not a weakness. Honolulu and Waikiki are a blast, home to classic luxury hotels (my wife, Susan, and I stayed at the fabulous Royal Hawaiian, called “the pink palace of the Pacific” for its Pepto-Bismol–colored stucco coat), rich history, beautiful public spaces, cool bars, and friendly people. Waikiki’s beachfront nightlife connects you to a magical past, when honeymooners wiggled toes in its sands and Hawaii Calls—a globally syndicated radio program broadcast from the Banyan Courtyard, at the Moana Hotel—sent out a musical aloha every Saturday night.

Today, Honolulu and Waikiki hum with Pacific Rim energy, and you can have plenty of fun just sunning, bodysurfing, strolling, shopping, and watching the limo-powered migrations of Japanese wedding parties. I especially liked the Ala Moana Center—a mall with an entire store devoted to ukuleles—and the huge, thrice-weekly flea market at Aloha Stadium. I bought used flippers; Susan picked up a few bushels of inexpensive jewelry and the first in her now alarmingly large collection of carved tikis. These weren’t mass-produced junk, either, but grimacing, two-foot-tall mini-masterpieces chipped out of monkey pod wood by local craftsmen.

Honolulu residents characterize a trip to the North Shore—where we spent several days at the spiff Turtle Bay Resort, an oceanfront golf-and-luxury spread near the island’s northernmost point—as going to the country. But you can get there in 45 minutes from downtown, so it’s more like going from San Francisco to Stinson Beach. We soon realized we could build busy days around my doing outdoor stuff in the morning, Susan going on urban adventures in the afternoon, and us doing something romantic together at night.

On a typical morning, I would surf (Turtle Bay’s resident pro, Hans Hedemann, taught me the basics), snorkel, or sea-kayak (in Kailua, you can paddle to a pair of offshore islands). Then I’d pick Susan up at lunchtime and we’d floor it to the nearest coconut stand. We’d either explore the North Shore—home to legendary beaches and surf spots like Waimea Bay and Pipeline, as well as Haleiwa, the main town for local hipsters—or we’d head back to the city, usually via the more scenic route on the island’s eastern shore. After a drink with a new pal like Lloyd Kandell—cofounder of Don Tiki, an Oahu-based band that specializes in the “exotica” sounds made popular in the fifties—we’d zoom north and stake out a hot tub at the resort. Our favorite offered a tiki-torch-framed view of Turtle Bay with a surf-powered blowhole going off in the foreground. The full moon came at no extra charge.

The last thing I did in Oahu wasn’t my usual scene: I signed up for a day of sportfishing out of Honolulu’s Kewalo Basin on a boat that, in its time, had landed a 939-pound blue marlin. This wasn’t one of those times, and by 9 a.m. I intuited that the adventure would be defined by eight hours of smelling diesel exhaust and watching hooks drag through the water without result.

Luckily, this was Oahu, so one of the other clients was my kind of boat mate: a spirited, chain-smoking divorcé;e from Los Angeles who made it clear with her friendly chatter that she was determined to have fun. Before long she noticed me sitting in the fighting chair looking glum.

“Were you wanting a beer or anything?” she offered.

I checked the time: 9:30. Yes.

“Kinda. But I didn’t bring any, so—”

“Hey, man,” she rasped, “I brought two six-packs and a bottle of Mr. Boston rum. And I’m not planning on taking any of it back.”

I saw her differently then. She was a sweet goddess, offering the rarest of island nectars. What could I say but mahalo?

Access & Resources
Hole Up: The 387-room Marriott Ihilani Resort and Spa, at Ko Olina, in Kapolei, dominates a cliff-backed spit of sand on Oahu’s west coast. In a full day here, you can snorkel the private lagoon, play 18 holes of golf, and still have time for a spa treatment. Doubles from $370; 808-679-0079, » With five miles of prime North Shore beach, 443 rooms, and two 18-hole golf courses, Turtle Bay Resort offers luxury on a grand scale. Snorkel the bay or take surf lessons with Hans Hedemann, then hit 21 Degrees North for martinis. Doubles from $400; 808-447-6508, » If you yearn for the quiet comforts of life on a Hawaiian beach, try one of the B&Bs available across the island—including the hotel-free eastern side—through Affordable Paradise. Studios from $55; 808-261-1693,

Dine: Chai’s Island Bistro, in downtown Honolulu, has upscale seafood, perfectly mixed cocktails, and a crack waitstaff in an unpretentious environment. 808-585-0011, » North Shore locals swear by Giovanni’s shrimp truck, with its $11 garlic-laden scampis. It’s always parked on the Kamehameha Highway in Kahuku. 808-293-1839 » For the Waikiki experience, try the Mai Tai Bar, at the Royal Hawaiian. Tiki torches, Hawaiian music, and hula dancers complete the vibe. 808-923-7311,

Get Out: Even novice sea kayakers will enjoy the reef-protected islands near Kailua Beach Park. Guide Steve Haumschild, of Kailua Sailboards & Kayaks, will lead you to some good snorkeling and teach you how to boat-surf waves along the way. From $39; 808-262-2555 » Wild Side Specialty Tours provides uncrowded (no more than 16 guests) dolphin- and whale-watching and swimming tours from a 42-foot catamaran off the west coast. From $95; 808-306-7273, » Wake up early and hike a mile and three-quarters to the top of 760-foot Diamond Head volcanic crater for the best view of sunrise over Honolulu and Waikiki. » At Mokuleia’s Dillingham Airfield, Honolulu Soaring offers 15-minute to hourlong rides in an aerobatic glider. You can’t beat the cockpit view, riding updrafts above the North Shore surf. $129–$228; 808-677-3404, » Or try a tandem jump with Skydive Hawaii. $225; 808-637-9700,

Shop: Seek out the talented (and hilariously grumpy) Tongan tiki carver Kini at the International Marketplace on Kalakaua Ave, Waikiki’s main drag. 808-971-2080,

A-List Island

Surfing superstars, media magnates, Hollywood glitterati—and you

Maui

Maui’s bright side

Maui

Just press play: La Perouse Bay, Makena; opposite, Hotel Hana-Maui’s sea-ranch suites

SO HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FEEL when the valet at the Hotel Hana-Maui (which must be the most understatedly elegant, eco-positive hotel on earth, in a genuine rural paradise) smiles and says, “You know, the surf’s so uncrowded around here that I’m usually trying to find people to go with me”? Especially when the guy’s eyes light up as he describes jet-ski trips to breaks so remote that you don’t see a single building, road, or human all day? Or when he freely gives me directions to a nearby beach break and those directions take me past the sleepy old Hasegawa General Store and out toward a barbecue stand with a hand-drawn sign reading LOCAL KIND GRIND?

And sure, I know that Carol Burnett, Jim Nabors, and George Harrison used to live out here in Hana, the easternmost point of the island, and that Kris Kristofferson still does. And I know that the town’s aflutter over Oprah’s recent purchase of more than a hundred acres of undeveloped Hana coast. But somehow the celebrity density only heightens my astonishment that on Maui, of all places, with its Gold Coast resorts and almost hourly jumbo jets, I can drift down a one-lane country road, past white egrets loitering in overgrown pastures among grazing Holsteins, and into a dazed state of tropical rapture.

I awoke yesterday morning in the baroque splendor of the Fairmont Kea Lani—65 miles away on the south shore, among Fantasy Island villas and talk of the Maui film festival and how it had drawn Adrien Brody and Greg Kinnear and Angela Bassett. Then I was whisked by helicopter along the slopes of 10,023-foot Haleakala to watch a 2,000-foot waterfall gush only yards beyond the windshield. I hiked 15 miles and 5,000 feet up into the famed Kaupo Gap, from prickly pear desert through sodden forest and alpine tundra beyond, then into the volcanic moonscape of the giant upper crater, an unearthly world of red ash and cinder cones, bizarre silversword plants, and solidified rivers of black magma.

Cresting a high ridge, I looked down the long, sweeping slopes to funky Paia town, where I’d dawn-patrolled clean-point surf the day before and watched gorgeous, half-naked fitness fanatics drink wheatgrass juice outside Mana Foods, chatting about their late-morning wave sail at windsurfing’s sweetest spot on earth, Hookipa. And those alpha dogs I saw at Anthony’s Coffee Shop? That was Laird Hamilton himself, with his pal Dave Kalama, who together had pioneered tow-in big-wave surfing on the 50-footers right down the road at Jaws—and who were among the first to launch kiteboarding as a sport, at the nearby strand known today as Kite Beach.

And now, not 24 hours later, I’m killing the engine at a red-sand beach with only three surfers in the warm water—two tanned adolescent boys and a teenage girl in a red bikini. Island kids, done with school for the day and frolicking in the world as they know it. There are finer pleasures to come—the full-body spirulina-and-kava spa treatment I’ve scheduled at the hotel and the nine-course tasting menu with wine pairings—but it’s right now, wading out for a sunset surf, that I realize why Maui is the only Hawaiian island named for a demigod. And not just any god, either: Maui was the greatest trickster in Polynesian culture, a sort of South Pacific Paul Bunyan/Odysseus hybrid who fished the Hawaiian islands up from the ocean floor, lifted the sky so people could walk upright, and lengthened the day by climbing to the top of Haleakala and lassoing the sun god.

There’s a genuine delight in this island and in the fact that—among all the high-dollar tourism and great yoga studios and world-famous surfing and movie-star real estate—there exists the paradoxical sense that you’ve finally found the place you’ve always dreamed about, the one beyond the end of the road, where you can leave it all behind and just stay.

Access & Resources
Hole Up: Set amid a 23,000-acre working pineapple plantation on Maui’s northwest shore is the 548-room Ritz-Carlton Kapalua, on white-sand D.T. Fleming Beach, near Honolua Bay, one of the world’s best right-hand surf breaks. Doubles from $365; 800-241-3333, » The Fairmont Kea Lani, on the sunny south side of the island, offers big-resort glam (suites are at least 840 square feet), exceptionally calm water, and a secluded beach. Doubles from $465; 800-257-7544, » Hotel Hana-Maui—47 cottages and 22 bungalow rooms overlooking the ocean—is the only hotel on the remote east coast. Doubles from $395; 800-321-4262,

Dine: The Paia Fish Market restaurant, in the heart of Paia, has your postworkout grilled mahi-mahi, fresh from the sea—just like you. 808-579-8030 » On the western edge of Lahaina and right on the water, Mala offers fresh and organic tapas—like mahi-mahi chermoula and crunchy calamari with aioli. 808-667-9394

Get Out: Latatudes and Attitudes does an all-day heli-hike, starting with whirlybird sightseeing over Haleakala and ending with a 15-mile catered hike from Kaupo Gap through the volcano’s crater (from $2,500). They also offer a four-hour guided waterfall hike in the West Maui Mountains ($75). 877-661-7720, » Visit Hana’s secluded Koki Beach for surfing and relaxing. » Sample Maui’s unrivaled watersports by ogling windsurfers at Hookipa, just beyond Kahalui’s airport, and tow-in surfers riding the monster waves at Jaws, 15 minutes east of Paia (turn left after the cemetery). Or learn to surf with the Nancy Emerson School of Surfing at the beginner-friendly Breakwall in Lahaina. $75 for two hours; 808-244-7873, » The road to Hana—600 curves and 54 one-lane bridges on about 30 miles of cliff- and jungle-edged road—is so unpopulated, you’ll find it hard to believe it’s on glitzy, golfer-inundated Maui. Gas up and take the long way back, along Haleakala’s leeward slope.

Shop: Drop by Hana’s Hasegawa General Store, for a Coke in a glass bottle—and trip out on a bygone world. 808-248-8231

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They’re still out there: the untrodden trail, the lost coast, the mountain vally from another century—some near, most far, all wide-open places waiting to expand your horizon and repair your fractured sense of time. Here’s our guide to 30 of the most amazing remote places on the planet. So clear your calendar, and drop us a line when you get back.

Live Vast

Author Ian Frazier explores what it means for something to be “far away.”

First tracks in the Australian outback.

I LIKE TO think that people I talk to have no idea how far away I am. Yes, I seem to be standing next to them at the bus stop and taking part in a conversation about the new commuter train and how it will cause real-estate values in our New Jersey suburb to rise; actually, however, in my mind I’m in eastern Montana, in the blankest part of the map, miles from anywhere. Often I pick out one remote place and carry it around as a secret destination to repair to inwardly if I can’t stand the ordinariness of the day. In certain jammed-up city situations, the mere thought of Dawes County, Nebraska (say), is soothing to me. When I let people glimpse this thought, the effect is a weird kind of geographic name-dropping snobbery: In midconversation, with no preamble, I’ll blurt out, “Well, I’ll be going to Dawes County soon. You never heard of it? It’s in western Nebraska—a great place—about 36 hours of driving from here.”

FOR ME, REMOTENESS is everything. I usually want to get as far away as I can, no matter where I am. If I go to the mall, I park in the parking lot’s farthest corner, with no other cars for acres around. I sit in the back row of the balcony at lectures and I stand in the hardest-to-reach nook at cocktail parties. I love the back of the bus. I wish you were allowed to wait on the roof at airports, and could consult with the doctor not in his claustrophobic office but on the farthest edge of the hospital lawn. Once, in the editorial offices of a magazine in New York City, someone made a remark to me that I didn’t like, and instead of replying I left, picked up a travel bag at my apartment, took a subway to the George Washington Bridge, and began to hitchhike west. I was all the way to Ohio before I cooled down.
I understand that this is not the healthiest approach to life. Almost as soon as I actually go to the remote place I’ve been fantasizing about, of course I want to be somewhere else. It’s a crazy frame of mind, and not particularly fair to the places themselves. I’ve noticed, too, that the better-known remote places recognize my type, and protect themselves from the affliction we are. When in my early thirties I decided to move to Fiji (mainly because of its name, and how cool I thought “I’m moving to Fiji” sounded), I went to the Fijian consulate in Manhattan to make preliminary plans. A somber man in a dark suit took in my hippyish appearance, sat me down, and ran through a carefully practiced list of reasons why I should not go there. Clearly, discouraging destination-crazed people from visiting Fiji was a major part of his job; with me, he succeeded.

Every place is “far away” to somebody. When you come back from a broken-down country overseas, the average airport men’s room in America can look like an unreachable island of luxury and light. But thank the gods of geography for the idea of remoteness itself, and for places that are “far away” to almost everyone. The dark end of the subway platform, the last stop on the train, the town in the Alaskan bush with a population of 20, the research station you can only get to two months a year, the Outer Hebrides, Tierra del Fuego, Guam, finis terrae—they’re an insignificant part of the earth’s surface, and we may never go to them, and if we do we probably won’t stay long. But their very existence aerates the imagination, like pinholes in the lid of a collecting jar. Circumstances enclose us all our lives; remote places are the perpetual promise of getting out and away.

: Falling off the Edge

A day’s walk into the Moroccan Desert, Sebastian Junger confronts a dizzying temptation.

Sticks and stones: an 11th-century mud-and-brick mosque in the Niger River trading port of Djénné, Mali.

WHEN I WAS 19 YEARS OLD, I saw a Royal Air Maroc travel poster of nomads on camelback. They were coming off the desert in a group, and there was something about the dust and the sunlight and the expressions on their faces that grabbed me. I put the poster on the wall of my college dorm and after a year of looking at it, I bought a plane ticket to Morocco with my oldest friend, a woman named Sarah. She was considering a job in the Peace Corps there. We flew to Casablanca and then worked our way over the Atlas Mountains by bus. The weather was bitterly cold, and after a couple of weeks we decided to go as far south as the roads would take us—to a garrison town called Goulimine. Not only did it look like the edge of the world, but it was the jumping-off point for Moroccan troops heading south to fight the Polisario guerrillas in the Sahara. It was as far as I could imagine ever getting from anything I knew.


We arrived at dawn after an all-night bus ride. There were a lot of soldiers in the streets, and they stared at us as we walked by. Goulimine was not a tourist town. We walked down the dirt main street until we came to a cheap rooming house, and we ducked into the doorway and asked the owner how much it cost for the night. It was something like a dollar. While Sarah negotiated with the owner, I looked around the dark room and realized it was filled with men sitting on the floor, drinking tea and studying us. Something about it didn’t feel right. One of them caught my eye: a blond-haired kid in a djellaba who looked at me and slowly shook his head, a warning. He wasn’t Moroccan; he looked like a European expat who had gone completely native. I looked around the room one more time, grabbed Sarah by the arm, and pulled her out.


We left our bags at another rooming house and immediately decided to walk out into the desert. I don’t know why—the simple urge to keep going? The pull of 2,000 miles of emptiness to the south? We cleared the last mud houses and started out across the brush-covered hardpan that extended, almost featureless, to the horizon. We walked all afternoon like that, without talking, without direction. Nothing changed but the position of the sun, which slowly swung from east to west behind flat gray clouds. We were about to turn around, thinking we would get back to town just after dark, when we saw something in the distance: a tent, and camels. It took us a long time to reach it, and as we got close, two men stepped out and waved. We walked up cautiously and greeted them in the Islamic way, with our right hand at our chest. They had tea boiling over a twig fire and were talking in a language that was not Arabic. They wore blue cloth that stained their skin and wore knives on their belts and had a flintlock rifle leaning against the tent post. They were Tuareg. The only object of Western manufacture was a plastic jug used to carry water. They motioned for us to sit down, and Sarah and I glanced at each other and took a seat in the sand.


The tea was served with great ceremony, poured beautifully into cups out of a battered tin teapot. I spoke French and Sarah spoke a little Arabic, but our hosts didn’t seem to understand much of either. I pointed to Sarah and myself and said, “America.” They just shrugged, so I drew a map of North Africa in the sand and gestured where our country was. It meant nothing to them. One of them swept his hand to the south and clapped his chest. I nodded. They asked the word for Allah. “God,” I said, and the younger one—a piercingly handsome guy of about 35&3151;tried out a few prayers, using the word God instead of Allah, collapsing in laughter at the end.


By now it was almost dark, and Sarah and I faced a long walk back to town. They gestured that we were invited to stay for dinner and the night. The older man—more reserved than the other, possibly his servant—cooked a bowl of stew in a clay pot banked with embers. They served us food on tin plates. After dinner I gave them my Swiss Army knife, and they gave Sarah some handmade jewelry. We were about to go to sleep when the younger man indicated that he had something important to say. He and his companion had come north to sell their camels, he explained; then they would go back into the desert. Six months from now they would be back in this same spot. If we wanted to join them, he promised he would return us safely to Goulimine in mid-July. It was their invitation. It was our choice.


It was a staggering idea—almost too staggering to contemplate. We would be completely dependent on these people for the next six months. We would be living with nomads somewhere in the largest desert on earth; there would be no way to get help, no way to leave, no way to communicate with home. We had to trust these two men utterly. It was something I’d never done before.


We went to sleep that night rolled up in goatskins. Maybe I’d already made my decision, I don’t know, but the next morning I woke up before dawn and pulled on my boots and jacket and walked out onto the desert. I couldn’t decide which was more upsetting—the idea of vanishing into the desert, or the idea that I wasn’t the kind of person who could do that. Sarah had already told me that she wouldn’t go, but that if I decided to, she would reassure my parents that I was safe. I stood there in the wind watching the sunrise, and when the lower rim had left the horizon and I felt the full warmth of the sun on my face, I walked back to camp. I simply had my limits, I realized.


Just contemplating that choice had altered me forever. I had stood on the threshold of a completely alien world, and even though I’d lacked the courage to cross over, at least I knew it existed. That knowledge was strangely humbling. It was also strangely reassuring. It seemed like maybe the one sure refuge we all had in the face of whomever it was we were taught to become.

: She Left My Heart In Jarbidge

Joh Billman’s searches for matrimonial bliss in Nevada’s loneliest town.

Home of the man-eating devil: Jarbidge Mountains, Nevada.

I COME FROM A FAMILY of elopers. My parents ran off to Deadwood, South Dakota, when Deadwood was the quintessential ghost town. Grocery clerk as a witness, then off to the Old No. 10 Saloon to dance and drink until my mom had to go out on Main Street and hurl. My half-brother, Coe, is a biker-blacksmith who has eloped a handful of times in a half-dozen Western states. No penguin suit. No white cake. No beer cans tied to the bumper, rice spraying your face like sleet. Eloping is the wedding and honeymoon all in a single rhinestone-spangled road trip.


I wanted to elope where the cartography gets fuzzy, and there are plenty of options within driving distance of my small Wyoming town. The wedding photos in my mind had a forty-niner daguerreotype quality to them, love prospectors in the hard country. My plan featured Nevada. The state smells like opportunity, I believed; driving through the basin-and-range country, UFO whack-jobs on late-night talk radio, it’s nearly possible to get ahead of yourself, like outdriving your own headlights. I imagined my beloved and me somewhere downwind of Reno and Vegas; no Elvis Chapel, no casino reception. Specifically, we aimed for Jarbidge, which bills itself as the Most Remote Town in the Lower 48. A hundred miles north of Elko, half of that on dirt and gravel the size of baby heads, infamous for the Shovel Brigade—conspiracy-theory anti-gubment types who banded together to reopen a Forest Service road closed to protect the endangered bull trout.
Jarbidge. Just saying the name had begun to taste like champagne.


We tossed our backpacks and a cooler in the truck and drove toward Elko. I was palms-sweating nervous. Hilary had the paperwork in her lap as we drove, dotting i’s, crossing t’s.


No air-conditioning, windows down, we rambled north through the sublime overgrazed bombing-range sagebrush steppe into the cool mountain range we’d been chasing on the horizon and turned off on a dirt road toward baby-please-don’t-quit-me. The little four-cylinder engine wound, wind scouring the west side of everything with sand.


In Jarbidge we pitched camp along Bear Creek, walking distance to downtown. The sound of the creek would be romantic, I figured, but it only succeeded in keeping us up most of the night. The eve of the nuptials we hiked to the Red Dog Saloon for Angel Creek Amber Ales. I asked the barmaid about churches, small talk, figuring I’d warm up to full-blown questions of marriage. “We’ve got Preacher Bob,” she said. “He holds services over there.” She pointed to an old board-and-batten whitewashed community hall straight out of Unforgiven; the last bona fide church had burned down years ago.


That night, Hilary dreamt she was walking around Jarbidge and none of the people had faces. She woke in a sour mood. I slipped away for a run up the canyon past abandoned gold mines and a lone rattlesnake and came back with endorphins enough to get married on. After bathing in icy Bear Creek, I put on my best snap-button Western shirt; Hilary in a sundress, we strolled to town. Jarbidge is one street running north-south splitting a steep canyon. As we walked hand in hand, Hilary noticed a historic marker informing visitors that “Jarbidge” is Shoshone for “bad or evil place.”


Things went sort of downhill after that. The Nez Percé and Shoshones believed a man-eating devil lived in this canyon and steered clear, never mind holding weddings here. Preacher Bob was nowhere to be found and Hilary announced that she refused to get married in a bad or evil place.


A midday window of sunlight from the slot in the clouds: high noon.


“Let’s go back to Wells,” I said. “We’ll get married in Wells.”


We drove a hundred-mile horseshoe out of Jarbidge Canyon and into southern Idaho, then Jackpot at the border and U.S. 93 south to Wells. I flipped through the Yellow Pages under “churches” and called them all. Every preacher in Wells was out—took it as a sign. Tying the knot in Nevada wasn’t meant to be. And buddy was it a quiet drive back to Wyoming, Buck Owens’s “Cryin’ Time” on the AM, Hilary as remote as Jarbidge.


Two months later we were married in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a cowboy/hippy justice of the peace who peppered the ceremony with cheerful Shoshone legend. Hilary refuses to go anywhere near Nevada, but I’d like to go back and throw flies at the redband trout in Bear Creek, sit on the deck at the Red Dog, and sip a beer among the faceless residents. Pay homage to our first efforts at conjugation, punch the devil in the nose, and try the town again.

: High Lonesome

Finding deep solitude in the Himalaya’s busy Everest region, Ronald Kral discovers, is surprisingly easy.

A few steps off the trekking highway: a windswept view of 26,750-foot Cho Oyo.

TO: outsidemag.com // FROM: rkral@thesoloist.com // SUBJECT: A Himalayan New Year’s
SO THERE I WAS, CAMPED AT 18,000 FEET, up an unnamed peak way off the beaten base-camp paths here in the Himalayas. Was hoping to catch first light of the new year on Everest, which dominates the eastern skyline. Nice view: Everest in one direction, 26,750-foot Cho Oyu in the other. Shame about the blizzard.


Not that it was entirely unexpected. Yesterday morning I was sipping yak-butter tea at Gokyo Namaste Lodge, staring at the huge lenticular over Cho Oyu. “Don’t worry,” said the lodge owner. So out I set, backpack packed with tent, North Face expedition bag, Therm-a-Rest, food, med kit, etc., for a two-day trek to this perch: 360-degree views, unusually warm, skies afire, a high alpine lake—mostly frozen—all creaks and moans, air trapped under the ice.


During the night, snowstorm. Kept up for two days. Soon my tent was a snow cave, walls molded by my hands. Had to crawl in and out through a hole until the weather broke.


SUBJECT: How to disappear in the mountains
Oops. Sorry to leave you hanging. I’m writing from Kathmandu, an Internet cafe with power problems. Bear with.


Let me tell you about the trek: connecting moraines, scrambling, threading boulder-strewn hillsides. To my right, 700 feet straight down to the Ngozumba Glacier. To my left, landslides off the high ridgeline. I’m 200 miles from the nearest road. A trail not fit for goats; no one would even know where to start looking.


That’s the thing about this place. Step just days away from the Himalayan highways, both literal and figurative, and you disappear. Start walking like I did, and pretty soon you’re wrapped in the arms of pure solitude.


SUBJECT: What did you do today?
God, did I sleep well in my cozy little snow hole. No signs of AMS. Or frostbite. Finally, a sunrise; time to head down. Much snow, ice, I glissaded pell-mell to the shore of an alpine lake. Then up again over another ridge. Arduous, but not as bad as defrosting my shoelaces in the evening to get my boots off, then redefrosting them in the morning.


Day five. Provisions for four. I drank snowmelt, scavenged in my pack for ramen, seaweed, etc. Trashbags on my legs for warmth, repeatedly flexed my toes and fingers; it was way below zero. Reached a mantle high above the Ngozumba. A crack in the cliff, no end run possible. I had to make a leap of faith, edge to edge, a hundred feet of air beneath my feet—


SUBJECT: Survivor
Made it! (SORRY, damn outages.) More exposed scrambling. One slip up there and I’m paste. When I reached bare, flat ground at last, I knelt down and kissed it.


Day seven. Still had many ridges to cross; small, flat valleys. Food and fuel gone, but I hoped the lodge owner hadn’t organized a rescue; I was only supposed to be out for four days, max. Pitched camp in a cave, moon floating over Cho Oyu. Would have been more fun if it wasn’t minus 30. I burned almost everything—diary pages I started in Africa, two pairs of socks (they should have been burned!), a pair of pants. Next day, I came stumbling into the lodge, past gaping trekkers and a man on a cell phone saying, “Looks like he’s alive.”


I’m a fool, I know, but I love these solo Himalayan romps. Already logged more than 1,000 miles in Nepal, Pakistan, and India, mostly alone. Would I recommend it? Certainly, if you’re into prolonged self-punishment. For me, heaven on earth.


I’m only passing through Kathmandu. Already I feel the crush of humanity; can’t wait to get back out again. Maybe further north. I hear China’s beautiful this time of year.

: Maximum Dose

Roland Merullo fled to Micronesia in search of a new life. He found it – but it was not what he expected.

Metropolitan Micronesia: the bustling Truk atoll.

WHEN THE PEACE Corps informed me that I was being sent to Micronesia, I went straight to my atlas. After much searching and squinting I found a sprinkling of dots just north of the equator and 2,000 miles east of the Philippines. Finally I located the Truk islands, my soon-to-be home: 11 small grains of pepper on the map’s wide blue middle.


Almost immediately I constructed an imaginary Micronesia—beautiful island women, succulent fruit, warm trade winds, translucent seas. I would spend my mornings helping desperately poor islanders, my afternoons snorkeling in wild, unpolluted waters, my nights reading in my thatched hut, or making love. At 25, I had already spent years dreaming of an Eden free of the rush, spoilage, and obsession with money that I felt surrounded me. Now I was sure I’d found it.
After a long flight across the Pacific and a few weeks of training on Guam, it was a two-day sail to my island, a speck of sand called Murilo, in the Hall group, eight degrees north latitude. Finally, on a brilliant September afternoon, I climbed down the ladder of the field-trip ship and into the skiff that would take me to the atoll. Above hung an enormous sky burned white by the tropical sun. Ahead was a Robinson Crusoe­like crescent of land fringed with palms and pandanus trees. On all sides, as far as I could see, the green Pacific sparkled and rolled. For a minute or two I was struck full in the chest by the wonderful mercilessness of the nonhuman world, the immensity. Salt spray flying up against my sunglasses, I sat amid an embarrassment of luggage, bearing big dreams.


Murilo was home to 200 people. Its summit stood six feet above sea level; you could walk the entire shoreline in 15 minutes. During the day, the heat was so intense that the Murilans sought shade whenever they could. But as soon as the sun set, bathing the cumulus clouds stacked on the horizon in scarlet and lavender, a sweet breeze rose off the water and blew until dawn. Yet it quickly became apparent to me that my visions of paradise had been absurd. The humidity curled up the edges of my notebook paper and glued my envelopes closed. Tiny flies swarmed my face and arms. The single females were all under the age of eight. The food—fresh fish of a hundred varieties, breadfruit, taro, coconuts, bananas, pumpkin, lobster, pig, dog, snails—while as tasty as I’d imagined, carried bacteria that plagued even the locals.


There was no mail. The only way on or off Murilo was the field-trip ship, which stopped by with supplies every three months. Worst of all, however, was the fact that I was completely superfluous on Murilo. The people were content—more content, by a good measure, than those I’d left behind. The women sang as they made rope from coconut-husk fibers. The men passed cigarettes around a circle, two puffs apiece, and carried buckets of fish over to a neighbor’s house after a lucky afternoon at sea. My elaborately detailedPeace Corps job—writing up the island laws into a kind of constitution—took an hour a month.


I filled the broiling, empty days by teaching myself to fish with a snorkel, a spear, and a slingshotlike loop of surgical tubing the locals called a Hawaiian sling. The waters around Murilo were full of sharks, nurse and black-tipped reef sharks, mostly, but tigers and hammerheads too, so the speared fish had to be killed immediately—by crushing the skulls between my back teeth. Every morning I returned to the sea, losing myself in schools of angelfish, surgeonfish, and barracuda, diving down after my speared lunch—living, for a few hours at least, like a full citizen of the natural world.


Despite the thrill of spearfishing, I lasted only five months, climbing back onto the field-trip ship with my idealism bruised and my body host to battalions of infections. The Murilans, friendly and hospitable as they were, simply didn’t need me. Still, when I stepped out of Logan Airport, after the 30-hour flight from Truk, I was carrying a fishing spear wrapped up in cardboard and tape. I keep it in my workshop now, a rusty reminder of the most remote place I’ve ever been. And sometimes, swimming in the waters off Cape Cod, I take a breath and dive, running my chest along the sandy bottom, imagining a solitary surgeonfish there, just ahead, just out of range.

: White on White

In Antarctica, visitors fall from the sky, discovers Mary Roach,. What they find there comes from both heaven and hell.

Cold, but windy: gliding above Port Lockroy, Antarctica.

THE INTERIOR OF ANTARCTICA is one of those rare places that look the same on a map as they do in real life: blank, vast, and entirely void of contours. These places attract me—polar ice sheets, Saharan wastes, the tundras of Greenland. Their beauty is somehow more forlorn and compelling for their utter unavailability to all but a persistent few. The fewer who’ve been there, the thinking goes, the greater the prize.


In the case of 76 degrees south, 156 degrees east, south-central Antarctica, the number couldn’t have been more than a dozen: the five members of The Antarctic Search for Meteorites team who spent a summer season there, the pilot who flew them in, and a handful of visitors, including myself. At first sighting, the place was just such a prize. “Meteorite City”—four canvas tents, seven Ski-Doos, and a sled packed with Top Ramen, salami, and prune-size shards of old shooting stars&3151;sat on a luminous pale-blue ice sheet whose surface dipped and rolled like a flash-frozen ocean. The wind had scoured away most of the snow, and carved the rest into sculptured banks of brilliant white, Styrofoam-hard sastrugi. Ribbons of snow-smoke woundpast my ankles. The ice was sequined with sun, and the sky was the kind of clear, deep, lit-up blue that you feel behind your eye sockets. It was the first day of my stay, and it felt like heaven.


Three days later, I wasn’t so sure. Heaven has a toilet and something good to eat. The uncomfortable realities of life in a tent at 30 below had begun to present themselves. Prime among them was a plastic bottle, labeled “P” for “pee”; it saved me from suiting up and crawling outside in the middle of the night. To keep its contents from freezing, I had to bring the bottle inside my sleeping bag, where it made friends with my contact-lens solution and the ten or 12 mini hand warmers with whom I also shared my bed. Otherwise I would have had a “P”opsicle, which could not be emptied out in the morning and which no one would want to thaw out over their camping stove for me.


Dinner was chicken patties with Tang sauce. Polarfleece became more familiar to me than my skin. Aside from Ski-Dooing back and forth on the ice searching for galactic rubble in 40-mph gales (constant, screaming wind is a necessary element of meteorite hunting because it exposes the elusive quarry) and reading in the 24-hour daylight, there was nothing to do.


By week’s end, it was okay to be leaving this beautiful place that I had dreamed of, staring at the white on the map and thinking, “I’m going to a place where no one ever goes.” Because now I knew why.

: In the Mountains of My Youth

Risk comes with the territory when trekking in Bolivia’s backcountry. But go with a posse of teenagers, as Joe Kane did, and the stakes get even higher.

Where few men dare to float: the sometimes fierce, sometimes meandering Tuichi River, Bolivia.

FOR QUALITY TROUBLE, give me South America. Whole countries get lost down there. (Ask ten people where Suriname is; only one will even know the continent.) Yes, you can get yourself in a good jam right here in El Norte, but there’s almost always a safety net. Cell phone, sat phone, GPS, radio: Help is an uplink away. Expensive help, but they take credit cards. Go remote down south, though, and six seconds of inattention will land your ass in a serious sling. Then what? Call the park rangers? The army? Sure. Quizás, tal vez, de repente, as they say in Peru&3151;maybe, perhaps, we’ll get right on it. Mañana posible.


I’ve visited the South American backcountry often enough to screw up with the sort of depth and regularity that is inconceivable without an expense account. In Yasuní National Park, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I found myself thrashing through bush so thick I didn’t see the sky for three days. No maps. No food. No sense of direction. I was traveling with Huaorani Indians, whose jungle navigation skills are perhaps the finest in the Amazon—and they were lost. By the time we stumbled out, I was close to starvation.
Or rafting the Apurímac canyon, in the Peruvian Andes. The Apurímac is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon; our maps, made by the Instituto Geográfico Militar, had big white spaces where the river was supposed to be. We certainly hadn’t expected to encounter Maoist guerrillas down there. But there they were, firing at us at dawn one morning. Cerebral edema at the source of the Amazon in the Andes? The medevac, if you’re lucky enough to have one, eats grass and wears a saddle.


After several close calls in South America, I did what any rational man would do: I went back with nine teenagers. I volunteer in a program that sends high school kids to Bolivia for six weeks every summer. Some are rich, some poor, some beamed in from Mars. One year, in one of those decisions that seems logical at the time but insane in retrospect, we took them on a backpacking trip way off the grid, from the Andean crest on an old Inca highway, then down into the Amazon basin. I worked sweep behind the only two girls. The trail was solid stone and slick as an ice rink. One girl wore Birkenstocks; at 16,000 feet she blew out an ankle. I emptied her pack into mine. The other girl got blisters and hurt her back. I took most of her stuff, too. My load now totaled about a hundred pounds. I kissed my knees good-bye.


We got blasted by snow, hail, rain, and wind until, late that first afternoon, we lost the rest of our group. Suddenly, characteristically, the Andes went from barren to so thickly forested you couldn’t step off the trail without a machete. The sun set. It got darker and colder. Only then did it occur to me that we had no food, water, or shelter and that if we did not reach our campsite we would spend the night standing up on the steep, narrow trail, alone, in the blackness and rain, hypothermic and hungry. We’d made mistakes; the bill had come due. But the girls soldiered on. They didn’t complain; they didn’t say a word.


Somehow we stumbled our way into camp, a barnyard I’d call fit for pigs except that I’ve met pigs who had it better. Two days later, when we reached an inn, I walked by the girls’ room and noticed that the stuff I’d been hauling included hardback books, jars of cosmetics, a copy of Clueless on videocassette. I stifled a scream.


Because by then we’d had a conversation. “It’s like there’s this whole other world out here,” said one. “I can go home, but nothing will ever look the same again.” Trite, perhaps, but for a 17-year-old girl who totes mud mask into the Bolivian backcountry, poignant. I knew what she was saying; I experienced the same feeling—like the rust was blasted off my soul—the first time I went south. Fifteen years later, I still do.

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