ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 17, 1996 TAG: 9611190023
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARY A. WARNER ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
``Aloha, please wait in the lobby.''
``Aloha, please wait in the lobby.''
``Aloha, please wait in the lobby. ... ''
The cooing greeters tossed sweet-scented flower leis around guests arriving at the Manele Bay Hotel on Lanai.
A bit woozy from the van ride along twisting roads, I plopped down in a cushy easy chair, surrounded by Chinese-style antiques, rugs and carved Burmese elephant tusks.
I was in a mustard-and-ruby world splashed by sun streaming in through huge picture windows overlooking the hotel beach where computer dweeb-turned-Microsoft zillionaire Bill Gates married in 1994.
As I sat sipping punch, a beaming staff member called my name and we strolled off through the open corridors awash with warm tropical sea breezes.
``Your room has a beautiful view of the golf course,'' the bellman said with a hint of excitement in his voice.
I'd come to Lanai to check out the two luxurious lodges erected on the closest thing to a private island in Hawaii.
The onetime ``Pineapple Isle'' is the latest and likely last frontier in the 100-year march of Hawaiian tourism.
Oahu was a tourist stop by the early 1900s. Hollywood discovered The Big Island in the 1930s. The 1958 movie version of ``South Pacific'' put Kauai on the tourist map. By the 1970s the Eagles were singing laments that Maui's remote charms were lost to the crowds. Travel magazines dubbed Molokai the hot spot in the 1980s.
Now it's Lanai's turn in the spotlight - and it has learned from the mistakes of its sister islands.
Lanai has no highways. No fast food. No chain motels. None of the T-shirt-and-trinket strip-mall tawdriness that has ruined large swaths of the Hawaiian paradise.
Scores of other travel writers had made the long trip to the onetime kingdom of the Dole Fruit Co. and came away awed and glassy-eyed, flipping madly through their thesauruses in search of new superlatives.
I too succumbed to the luxury. The big resorts on Lanai turn pampering into an art form. Gracious staff at your beck and call. Huge rooms. Championship golf. Killer food. Peace. Harmony. Quiet. A world with the jagged edges rubbed away.
But after three days, I was ready to leave. Really ready.
Amid the splendor, there was a little buzz growing in the back of my mind. Everything was a little too neat. A little too ordered. A little too exclusive.
At some point, the boisterous party scene in Lahaina or even the glitz and bustle of Waikiki would have been a welcome relief.
I felt like a prisoner in paradise.
Imagine a lost ``Gilligan's Island'' episode where Thurston Howell III dumps his wife, Lovey, to marry Ginger the movie star, and you've got a snapshot of my fellow passengers in the van to the Manele Bay Hotel.
Three rich guys in their 50s with second wives in their 30s. Rolexes and Gucci loafers. Golf clubs piled high in the cargo space.
Paradise has a price tag and Lanai's is a pretty steep one. All but 12 of the island's 362 rooms cost a minimum of $275 per night. The dinner tab at the island's top restaurant can easily exceed $200 per couple. A day rental of a Jeep Wrangler runs $119, plus tax. A round of golf and a cart to ride in will set you back $100.
Visiting Lanai is about hemorrhaging money - and being rich enough to not really care.
Lanai has been essentially a private island since James Dole plunked down $1.1 million in 1922 and planted 16,000 acres of pineapples.
The Hawaiian tourism boom bypassed Lanai until the early 1990s when current owner David Murdock stopped planting pineapples and started harvesting tourists.
Since 1993, the only pineapple you're likely to see on Lanai is in a hotel bar garnish dish. Agricultural machinery is limited to the golf-course lawnmowers.
My first stop was the beachfront Manele Bay Hotel, nestled up against one of the most beautiful strands of sand in the Hawaiian Islands.
My room in a far wing was huge, quiet and comfy. I opened the windows and gazed out at a pair of axis deer running across the fairway of the Challenge of Manele, the Jack Nicklaus-designed 18-hole, par-72 golf course.
The Challenge snakes along the rocky rims of Lanai's shoreline, crashing Pacific waves beckoning Titlelists or Maxflis down to Davey Jones' Locker. The 12th hole boasts a 150-foot drop from the clifftop tee.
When it comes to golf, I'm all shanks and slices. The Challenge would be too challenging.
So I decided to take the waters. Fresh, salt, hot, cold - the Manele Bay Hotel has them all.
A rolling green lawn dotted with cozy blue and white cabanas perfect for a snuggle or snooze overlook the wide white beach along Hulopoe Bay. There's excellent snorkling and sailing off the bay, all available through the hotel.
The star of the hotel is the luxurious, luminescent oval pool, flanked by twin bubbling whirlpools. I could hardly wait as I donned my psychedelic Reyne Spooner trunks and headed off to the pool.
I arrived to find that the hotel was hosting a huge convention party next to the pool. While technically not closed, hotel staff made it very clear that anyone silly enough to swim in front of hundreds of milling cocktail- swirling strangers would be met with stares of disapproval.
Glumly, I returned to my room for a nicely grilled ono dinner. Later I stopped by the very, very quiet hotel bar. Outside through the picture windows the pool shimmered. Empty. A brightly lighted backdrop to a stilted business soiree.
Just about anywhere else in the world, the Manele Bay Hotel would be all the buzz. But like Lou Gehrig batting behind Babe Ruth, the Manele Bay's glossy reputation is overshadowed by its sister resort, The Lodge at Koele.
Looking like an English country manor amid a forest of pine trees, the hotel is famed for its Great Hall with its 35-foot ceiling and huge fireplaces. Generous rooms are filled with Laura Ashley-style trappings.
The hotel boasts great Pacific Rim-influenced food creations and game dishes such as local axis deer. Golfers have yet another 18-hole paradise, the Greg Norman-designed Experience at Koele, highlighted by the challenging mountain-rimmed eighth hole with its 200-foot drop into a ravine.
The tattoo of superlatives doesn't stop for what everyone simply calls ``The Lodge.'' Conde Nast Traveler's readers rated it their favorite resort in all the world. The respected Zagat Survey put it at the top of Hawaii's hundreds of hotels and called its dining room the best, too.
``It feels like Northern California or New England, but with better sun,'' Zagat gushes.
Call me a hayseed heathen, but I don't get the draw. Why come all the way to Hawaii to pay a minimum of $325 per night to stay on a chilly hilltop in a faux English manor?
I can understand the allure for Hawaii residents, who can't get the real alpine thing anywhere close. But if I want a mountaintop lodge, I'll go to the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho or the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah. If I want English, I'll go to England.
In Hawaii, I want palms - not pines. In the Lanai hotel competition, my vote goes to Manele Bay. At least I know what state I'm in.
At the Lodge, I ``talk story'' late into one evening with a fatherly bartender (the best kind) who had worked two decades in the pineapple fields. When Dole made a career change, he went along.
At the end of a long night, he invited me to his church the next morning for a goodbye party for the local parish priest who was moving to a church on Oahu.
The following day, I made the short stroll into town, the mist hanging low on the Norfolk pine trees. For a rare moment in Hawaii, I wished I had brought a sweater.
I passed the sweet little Hotel Lanai, the 1920s hotel built for VIPs visiting the pineapple fields. It's a fine little hotel with a nice veranda - worth at least a stop for breakfast or lunch.
Outside I heard something I hadn't heard in three days: noise.
A happy noise. Singing. Shouting. Laughter.
I followed the sounds down Eighth Street, past Dis N' Dat and other small shops around Dole Park, the center of town life. At the bottom of the hill was the simple Catholic church on Fraser Street. The noise was pouring from around back, where a party was in full swing.
The uniformed hotel employees I had met the night before were in their Sunday best - bright Hawaiian shirts and slacks for the men, colorful short-sleeve dresses for the women.
A banjo, guitar and fiddle player performed country-style music and I got up a few times to circle around the crowds. People clapped and sang. Father Bob, as everyone called him, sat at the head of a long table, stopping every few minutes for a hug or kiss or to cuddle a baby against a chest covered in homemade aloha leis.
A long table displayed potluck delights, many culled from family recipes featuring the island's old mainstay crop: pineapple salmon teriyaki, pineapple fritters, pineapple short cake, pineapple fruit salad. I took my paper plate and foam plastic cup of juice to enjoy on the church stoop the best meal of my trip.
In Makaha on Oahu or Wailuku in Maui, I'd been shunned and felt threatened as an outsider. But here, love and happiness reigned. Though a stranger, I was made to feel a part of the church family. When people found out I was a journalist, I was enlisted as photographer for a seemingly endless string of family portraits.
After a couple of hours, I waved goodbye and walked back up the road to The Lodge. Inside the doors, a couple in blinding white tennis duds sat dourly reading in the Great Hall, hardly talking to each other. Staff members scooted about silently. A mother nervously hushed her young child, pulling him off a large pillow-laden couch where he had started to have fun, jumping up and down.
I packed up for the ferry to Maui.
On my last day, I had found my Lanai, the one I'll remember. You can't get a tee time on it or a shuttle bus to it. But it is there - just follow the happy noise.
LENGTH: Long : 184 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS/Los Angeles Times. 1. Luxuriousby CNBsurroundings, including an oval-shaped pool, await guests at the
Manele Bay Hotel (far left). 2. At the Lodge at Koele, rooms (left)
filled with Laura Ashley-style trappings bring to mind a British
hotel. 3. A forest of pine trees looks down upon the Lodge at Koele.
4. Manele Bay Beach on the island of Lanai, Hawaii. is the perfect
place
to exchange vows. color.