A Green, Well-Lighted Place

Let’s assume that you have earned or inherited a bunch of money, or you wish to behave for a few days as if you have.

You find your way to the Honolulu or Maui airport. You step away from the masses into a small plane, which half an hour later drops you at a tidy new airport on a small green island, where low clouds cling to pine slopes.

Someone takes your bags. Someone else helps you into one of two waiting hotel vans, and soon you’re whisking along a few miles of two-lane road, past acre after acre of grassy, sun-kissed plantation fields gone wild. There are just two major hotels on the island, and one van is going to each. Either way, you are now a character in the daydream of a billionaire and the nightmare of many stockholders.

Down by Hulopoe Bay, along the shores where Microsoft man Bill Gates staged his high-security wedding in 1994, the sun bakes golden sand and waves crash beneath cliffs of deep red rock. One van’s guests are gently deposited a few yards from this beach in the splendor of the Manele Bay Hotel lobby with its intricately carved 19th century Burmese elephant tusks. Instead of waiting at the desk to check in, they take tropical drinks from a tray and sink into comfortable chairs and couches, where a hotel worker will find them, and lead them off to their rooms. Outside, beyond the pool and beach, an oceanfront golf course awaits.

To reach the second main hotel, the other van rolls past the quaint, orderly grid of Lanai City (population: 2,700) to Koele, the island’s higher ground, where cattle graze photogenically, mists cling to the slopes, and pines rise along dramatic ridge lines. That van delivers its guests to the Lodge at Koele, and they step beneath the entryway mural of an enormous pineapple. Inside, they find a pair of 40-foot-high rock chimneys, delicate Thai carpets, 17th century botanical prints, broad views of placid ponds, manicured gardens and another golf course.

So go the days on the island of Lanai, nirvana for lovers of exclusivity, order and golf. Its promoters call it the Private Island because one man, David Murdock of L.A.’s Westlake Village, leading stockholder in Dole Food Co.Inc. and Castle & Cooke Inc., controls 98% of it.

You could also call it the Pricey Island. In a state where the average hotel room fetched $119.75 nightly during the first two months of 1996, all but about a dozen of Lanai’s 362 hotel rooms are priced at more than twice that, and some surpass $1,000 bightly. Want to rent a Jeep Wrangler for the day and explore a few dirt roads? That’s $119 plus tax at Lanai City Service, the only car rental outlet in town. Want an entree in one of the hotel dining rooms? About $25-$45. In fact, the only logical lodging option for the unwealthy is Lanai City’s Hotel Lanai, a semi-secret hostelry of 11 rooms in a plantation building that dates to 1923. Though it, too, is owned by Murdock and company, most rooms run $95 nightly, and guests enjoy some of the same privileges, such as free shuttle service, that are set aside for Manele Bay and Koele guests.

On this April trip, I spent two nights at Manele Bay and one at Koele, both lodgings that deliver an exclusive, restful experience--more formal at Koele, more casual at Manele Bay--to the well-heeled traveler who seeks a simplified life of beach, scenery and a golf course or two. But as a traveler whose annual income falls way short of six figures, I’d next time look closely at the Hotel Lanai.

*

Now you’re on the beach, a book in hand. This being a beach sort of vacation, you’re probably reading some trash, maybe James Michener. But there is the off-chance you have purchased “The Story of James Dole” in the hotel gift shop.

If so, you’ll find that for most of this century, this 89,000-acre island has been dedicated to the cultivation of pineapples. Hawaiian fruit-packing pioneer James Dole bought 98% of Lanai for $1.1 million in 1922. By the 1980s, the Dole Food Co., based in Westlake Village, had 9,000 acres planted, producing about 180,000 tons of pineapple yearly. Visitors stayed in the Hotel Lanai, paying $50-$60 a night.

Then, in 1986, as the cheaper labor in pineapple-producing areas such as Thailand and the Philippines began to look more and more attractive, Dole’s recently arrived chairman and chief executive officer, David Murdock, visited Koele and disclosed an idea.

“I would like to build a lodge, not too many rooms, maybe no more than 100,” Murdock wrote in a manifesto that is reprinted in Lanai promotional literature. (Island residents heard later of plans for the second hotel, the golf courses and the vacation condos and homes.)

Island days are not complicated. Knowing that shuttle vans depart every half hour to navigate the island’s three paved roads (no stoplights), you can rise from your bed at Manele Bay, breakfast on the terrace, and take a little stroll past the luau grounds to watch a few local teenagers surf at the red rock of Puupehe. Then you zip up to Koele, where it’s usually about 10 degrees cooler, for afternoon golf. (In a recent readers’ poll subscribers to “Conde Nast Traveler” named the Experience at Koele their favorite course in the world.) At Koele and at the Challenge at Manele, hotel guests pay greens fees of $78 for 18 holes, along with $22 for cart rental.

You can breakfast at Koele, with a picture-window view of Asian-flavored gardens, then borrow a hotel bicycle and toddle around the green central square of Lanai City. On the square, you can browse through the art for sale at the Heart of Lanai gallery or the neighboring Lanai Art Program office, or you can stop for an affordable bite, and perhaps eavesdrop on locals, at the Blue Ginger Cafe or the Hotel Lanai restaurant.

One joy in an absolute retreat like Lanai is that you can limit each day to a small number of simple, pleasant decisions: Laze around the pool at Manele Bay? Or pad down to a parasol on the beach, where they dispense free masks, snorkels and fins, and where guests get their suntan lotion from a tub the size of a water cooler?

Families with children tend to favor the more informal Manele Bay Hotel, where the large pool and adjacent whirlpool can keep kids occupied for hours. For dining, you may tuck into a casual dinner on the patio of the Manele Bay Hotel’s Hulopoe Court, or go more upscale at the Ihilani dining room a few paces away; or, for the snazziest dinner on the island, call for a reservation and slip on your blazer, as required, to face island-accented continental entrees in the Lodge at Koele’s formal dining room.

My favorite dish, delivered at the Lodge at Koele, was startlingly pretty and tasty: the breakfast pancakes with strawberries, raspberry sauce and papaya butter.

It was just after the pancakes that I retreated into the Lodge at Koele’s elaborately appointed library, digested a little local history, and, employing my best prospective investor’s scowl, pored over hotel literature and a displayed copy of the Dole Food Co.’s 1995 annual report.

Between 1985 and 1991, Murdock’s company spent more than $250 million on the transformation of Lanai from plantation to resort. The Lodge at Koele, with 102 rooms, opened in 1990, followed a year later by the 350-room Manele Bay Hotel. Commissioning artworks and stockpiling antique furnishings, Murdock and company aimed for the highest end of the market--and debuted just in time to suffer the full weight of the American and Japanese recessions.

One estimate put the Lodge at Koele’s first-year occupancy at just 15%. These days, insiders say, the figures are probably closer to 60%--company officials won’t release specific numbers--but behind these handsome interiors and sprawling landscapes, a company has been bleeding. Company officials reported $36 million in losses on Lanai in 1995, and in December “wrote down” the investment’s value, saying in essence that the resort upon which they had spent $400 million was now worth a “book value” of only about $235 million. In a simultaneous move that protects Dole’s stockholders against any future Lanai losses, Dole spun off its Lanai holdings into a separate company, Castle & Cooke Inc.

The chief financial officer of that company, Edward Roohan, reports that the first quarter of 1996 was Lanai’s best ever: For the first time, the resort made more than it spent--a narrow $400,000 more, before depreciation.

Even to a casual guest, it’s fairly clear that Murdock’s long-term hope for Lanai is that the company can recoup its losses by gently steering guests into purchases of the condos and homes that he is putting up near the hotels. Brochures are placed in every guest room, models are open for browsing and tours for hotel guests are offered daily. As of late May, Murdock had completed 19 luxury townhomes and houses on the island and received government approval to build about 750 more. Prices begin at $400,000 for bare lots, $497,000 for townhomes, $945,000 for homes. But there’s a long way to go. In late May, a Koele salesman counted only six escrows closed.

Meanwhile, the company has faced persistent challenges to its expansion, mostly from those few Lanai residents who are not its employees. They worry that precious wilderness will be cleared to make way for ritzy vacation residences, that golf-course irrigation is straining the island’s limited water supply, that Murdock’s plans will undercut legally mandated public access to beach areas.

Company officials say they’re being as sensitive as possible, following all laws, and have installed several programs to preserve island traditions, and ease residents’ lives in the transition from agriculture to tourism. But there’s no quieting Murdock’s leading critic, a 57-year-old hospital maintenance supervisor named Ron McOmber, whose success in slowing down Murdock was the subject of a 1995 front-page Wall Street Journal story.

I invited McOmber to lunch. We met at the Blue Ginger Cafe, and he handed over a business card that featured the terms used to describe him by various persons quoted in the Wall Street Journal story: “A MADMAN, Thorn in Your Side, Harrasser, Screamer, Bad Neighbor, Conscience of the Community.” Then I asked McOmber what he thought of Murdock, then strained to scribble as fast as he spat out epithets.

“He’s an egomaniac. I have no aloha for him whatsoever,” said McOmber with evident fury. “He had the goose that laid the golden egg, and he’s made a frozen duck out of it . . .”

*

A visitor can be adventurous on Lanai, within certain limits.

One day, beginning at the Lodge at Koele, I took a hike described in a hotel pamphlet, trudging 2.5 miles along the golf course, beneath a canopy of Norfolk pines and along Koloiki Ridge. The scenery on the way was pedestrian by Hawaiian standards, but there was a payoff: From the hike’s end point, a hiker sees stark, sloping Naio Gulch to the left, the green recesses of Maunalei Gulch to the right, and straight ahead, the deep blue Pacific, neighbor islands looming beyond it.

Another day, I rented a Jeep and spent a couple of hours churning mud and looking for Axis deer along the dirt-road, seven-mile Munro Trail, a ridge-top route named after a ranch manager who started a reforestation program in the island high country during the Pineapple Era. Then I headed north, scavenged the shore at Shipwreck Beach, and finally rumbled a few miles west to inspect the strangely stacked stones in the northwestern red-earth landscape known as “Garden of the Gods.”

In the course of all this driving, I realized I wasn’t seeing any pineapples at all, just pineapple logos painted on walls, stitched on golf shirts, and printed on sales brochures. Finally, I stopped at the police station--eight officers cover the entire island--and asked where I could find actual pineapples.

They sent me toward the airport, where, just adjacent to the airport road, a few patches survive, evidently for the sake of appearances, not export. I snapped a few photos, then headed back toward the lodge and its luxuries. After all, I was a guest on Lanai, and another meal would be coming up shortly. I had simple, pleasant decisions to make.

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GUIDEBOOK: Lay of the Lanai

Getting there: The only way to reach Lanai by air is via a change of planes in Honolulu or Maui. Hawaiian Airlines offers an LAX-Lanai connection with restricted coach fares beginning at $482. Several airlines fly LAX-Honolulu, with round-trip restricted coach prices beginning at $458; and Hawaiian and Aloha airlines fly Honolulu to Lanai for $96 round trip. United and Delta airlines fly LAX-Maui round-trip for restricted coach fares beginning at $558, and Maui-Lanai round-trip flights on Aloha Airlines beginning at $106 round trip.

Where to stay: The Lodge at Koele (telephone [800] 321-4666 or [808] 565-7300, fax [808] 565-4561), with 102 rooms, offers daily rates of $295-$1,100. Still costly, but a better value, is the hotel’s “four by four” adventure package, which gives guests four nights’ lodging, four breakfasts, four dinners and three other activities (or seven activities and no meals, if you prefer) for $389 per room per day.

The Manele Bay Hotel (tel. [800] 321-4666 or [808] 565-7700, fax [808] 565-2483), with 250 rooms, charges daily rates of $250-$2,000. It also offers a “four by four” package, at the same price as Koele’s.

The Hotel Lanai (tel. [800] 321-4666 or [808] 565-4700, fax [808] 565-4710) has 10 rooms that rent for $95 nightly and one cottage that goes for $135.

For more information: Hawaii Visitors Bureau, Empire State Building, 350 Fifth Ave., Suite 1827, New York, NY 10118; tel. (800) 353-5846, fax (212) 947-0725.

--C.R.