West Maui

This is the Maui you are likely to see on postcards. It is, after all, the island's most bustling resort area. The beauty of the jagged West Maui mountains, with with their deeply carved green valleys wreathed in mist, the golden sands of the beaches kissed by turquoise seas, and the familiar sight of boats bobbing in the Lahaina Harbor, are favored photographic and artistic subjects. They make the pictures of a promise of Paradise found.

The West Maui Mountains were once about 7,000 feet high. The top collapsed, forming a wide caldera. Erosion carved it down even further, and its highest point, Puu Kukui, now stands at 5,788 feet. At one time, it is said, the West Maui volcano stood at more than 25,000 feet from its base on the ocean floor.

What is left of the volcano crater is deep within the peaks at the head of Iao Valley. From this crater several valleys radiate outward: Iao, Kahakuloa, Ukumehame, Olowalu and Honokohau.

Famed as the former capitol of the Hawaiian kingdom, Lahaina and the surrounding area was the playground of kings, with a historic port town that welcomed the rowdy, raunchy crews from the whaling ships in the early 1800s, as well as the headquarters of the missionaries who came to the islands to rescue pagan souls.

West Maui became a tourist mecca in the mid-1960s.

Lahaina:

Lahaina means "merciless sun," and it is one of the hottest spots on the island. Lahaina has always been one of the centers of activity on Maui. Maui's King Kahekili called Lahaina home until King Kamehameha defeated him in the late 1700s. Kamehameha set up his own power base in Lahaina, which remained the seat of Hawaiian power until Kamehameha III moved his capitol to Honolulu in the mid-1800s.

It was not until the tourist boom and the resorts were developed in Kaanapali during the mid-1960's that Lahaina town, which had become a virtual ghost town after the whaling fleet stopped coming, began to bustle again. Restoration of the town's old wooden buildings proceeded apace and the town has been declared a National Historical Landmark.  

With the revitalization of the town came a colony of artists and craftspeople, and a blossoming of art galleries heavy on marine themes, boutiques, great eating places and sophisticated night-spots as well as a proliferation of time-share salesmen, kiosks touting various activities of one sort or another, and shops filled with touristy gimcracks and t-shirts blazoned with slogans that quickly become clichés.

     Kaanapali:

Four miles west of Lahaina, just off Honoapiilani Highway, is Kaanapali, Hawaii's first master-planned family resort. Mid-rise hotels line nearly three miles of sandy beaches, linked by a network of landscaped parkways and jungle-lush plantings. Golf courses wrap around the slope between beachfront and hillside properties.

This area, with its resorts and beautiful beaches that have unparalleled views of neighboring Molokai and Lanai islands, was once part of a sugar plantation owned and operated by Pioneer Mill Company. At Black Rock, a volcanic spatter cone that divides Kaanapali Bay in half, was a wharf from which sugar, molasses, canned pineapple, fuel and various other products were shipped. At one time there were two large storage tanks, one for molasses and the other for fuel, a sugar warehouse, housing for wharf employees and a plant that turned pineapple cores and skins into cattle feed.

Just inland of the wharf and the sugar plantations was an old racetrack used on weekends and holidays. It is now a commercial airport for small aircraft.

Soon after Hawaii became America's 50th state in 1959, people from the Mainland discovered Maui and began visiting the island and building vacation homes. As more and more people flocked to the island, tourism was seen as the panacea that would waken the sluggish local economy. Beautiful beaches and balmy weather became assets to be developed.

AmFac (American Factors), a company that had existed since the days of the sugar moguls, owned much of the beachfront property in Kaanapali, and they quickly realized the potential of their holdings. A single low-rise hotel, the Royal Lahaina Resort, and golf course was built before Kaanapali Bay. Shortly afterwards another hotel, the Sheraton, was built on Black Rock. These two hotels were the forerunners of the Kaanapali complex, a line of side-by-side high-rises.

Kapalua:

North beyond Kaanapali and the shopping centers of Napili and Kahana, the road climbs and the vista opens up to fields of silver-green pineapple and manicured golf fairways. Turn down the lane lined with Pacific pines, toward the sea, and you are in Kapalua.

These windswept western foothills of Puu Kukui, the second wettest summit on earth, roll down to the sea in a 1,500 acre patchwork of green slopes that end at five bays which were once frequented by royalty. Across the channel, the island of Molokai looms. Weather in the channel can get rugged with gusty winds and April showers.

The Residences at Kapalua Bay are being constructed on the oceanfront property formerly the site of the Kapalua Bay Hotel.  Surrounded by world class golf courses, ample tennis courts, historic features, premier condos and homes and wide open spaces that include a rain forest preserve, Kapalua is truly a luxury resort community. There is an art school as well as innovative environmental programs and noteworthy annual events including a food-and-wine symposium, a music festival and a writer's conference.

A pineapple plantation owned by Maui Land and Pineapple Company, Kapalua still has an old general store and vintage Victorian church, the last vestiges of the plantation worker camps where the pineapple field workers lived along the shoreline and a little farther inland. The 23,000-acre pineapple plantation still operates and the master-planned resort developed by the late Colin Cameron in the 1970s takes up less than 1,000 acres of the plantation.