Aloha to the eco revolution

Hawaii is getting serious about its image and embracing green tourism. COLIN MOORE explains why.

Hawaii has discovered eco-tourism. But before you start to say, "So what?" think about it. Europeans and Americans have been traipsing through New Zealand on eco-tours for a couple of decades.

In the Pacific you can take an eco-tour in Fiji, the Cook Islands and even on the tiny coral rock of Niue you can go looking at birds and bees and plants that will heal you of something.

So it surely says something about Hawaii when eco-tourism becomes a buzz word in America's Pacific Island state.

Traditionally travellers go to Hawaii to look at the surf and bikini-clad bathers, drink mai tais at Duke's Bar in Waikiki, and watch grass skirts waving at a luau.

Look around and you're likely to find that your fellow watchers soaking up the Hawaiian sun and friendly, easy-going welcome are mostly Japanese and mainland Americans. And they're not known for being big on birds and bees tours. What you'll rarely hear is a German accent - probably because they are on a greenie tour elsewhere.

For Hawaii to embrace eco-tourism doesn't mean a change in focus but it does mean that there is another attraction in the islands of Aloha to make it a principal holiday destination ahead of islands in the South Pacific or the resorts of Queensland. And it could be one way to lift Hawaii from the image of a Disney-like, sanitised version of Polynesia.

With the tiniest of proddings, Dominic Kealoha Aki, founder of Mauka Makai Excursions, discourses at some length about the rather shabby annexation of the islands by the United States in 1898 to protect the interests of American sugar barons.

He tells of the Great Mahele in 1848 when King Kamehamea III attempted, at the urging of missionaries, to make the land, most of it previously owned by the king or island chiefs, available to commoners. The result, in just a few years, was that Westerners owned most of the islands and indigenous Hawaiians were left landless.

Attempts to redress this have been abused. Land granted as Hawaiian Home Lands is leased by sugar and ranching companies for a pittance or taken by federal, state and county Government illegally and with no compensation for anything from a golf course to a naval base.

And, with something of a familiar ring, indigenous Hawaiians have the lowest average family income in the islands and are at the bottom of most health and welfare indicators, including high-school drop-outs, suicide rates and disease statistics. They also make up a disproportionately high percentage of Hawaii's homeless.

Kealoha Aki stops short of harassing his eco-tour clients with a political rave but it is clear that the Hawaiian sovereignty movement is alive and ticking over with some momentum.

That's the thing with eco-tourism, as distinct from the Kodak hula show in Waikiki - you can't take people to look at flora and fauna without talking about environmental impacts and endangered species.

Kealoha Aki taught snowboarding in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, before coming home and spotting a tourism niche.

He takes us along a quiet stream in the middle of Honolulu suburbia. It used to be an ancient trail that followed the stream to irrigated taro gardens. It has been saved only because it tends to act as an urban stormwater drain, although now it is a reserve.

Some of the stonework of the taro gardens remains and so does a petrograph scored in a rock.

It's a pretty, inner-city walk but the notion of it is clearly in its infancy. A few months under the care of our Department of Conservation and it would be preened and pruned, with non-natives weeded out, the original path better revealed, and some informative signs for visitors - and all the better for it.

At the end of an urban cul-de-sac we climb a rough, unmarked track to a large patch of scruffy land on the hillside. This is an outstanding example of an old war temple site that the ancient Hawaiians built with stone and protected with carvings.

From a high tower of wood and thatch the chief and his kahunas - professional advisers - could watch the bay below, make sacrifices to the gods or punish those who had broken a kapu, or chief's law.

The temples were destroyed at the behest of European missionaries, the land lost to private ownership, and the stone remains overgrown.

Charles Ogata, a retired university lecturer in anthropology and archaeology, has persuaded the landowner to allow volunteers to remove the undergrowth and expose the temple layout.

It's Saturday morning and a few volunteers are there with their slashers and sandwiches. They include a city councillor doing his bit for indigenous culture but Ogata says,sadly, that he doesn't know of any plans to buy the area and protect it.

We stop at a crumbled stone wall while Kealoha Aki offers a prayer before stepping into the football-field-sized enclosure where Ogata explains, with the use of a model he has built, how the war temple of Kahua Laa would have looked several hundred years ago.

A few kilometres away another temple site is protected as a public reserve. It is a huge mound of lava rocks, about the size of a school hall, something like an Egyptian pyramid with the top half sliced off. Temple buildings would once have stood on this enormous stone altar.

Behind it is the site of a vast fish pond and taro-growing area. Once it was a saltwater lagoon where fish could be kept alive until they were needed but fresh water intruded long ago and the area was used by Asian immigrants as a fish farm.

Now it is a wetland area for birdlife. Kealoha Aki points to the remains of a taro plantation. As we look, a European arrives with gardening tools, strips to his shorts and wades into the high grasses where he has discovered an old taro plantation and is tending it for his own use.

Some days later, on the island of Maui, I visit the Iao Valley State Park and watch volunteers restoring traditional taro plots. They are stone-lined pits built alongside streams, filled with soft humus for the taro to grow in, and irrigated by a network of drains.

Still in search of something more wholesome than mai tais, I head off for a reef adventure. Hanauma Bay, a marine conservation islet within shuttle-bus distance of Waikiki, gets up to 10,000 snorkellers a day. The water is so thick with fish food used to attract hordes of colourful tropical fish that the bay has to be closed one day a week so the water can be sieved clean.

I leave Hanauma to others and go to nearby Maunalua Bay for a scuba dive in turtle canyon. The Reef Adventure company ferries divers to a launch anchored in the bay.

The visibility is good and there is no shortage of green sea turtles but the coral reef is a bit the worse for wear, perhaps because too many divers - if my dive master is anything to go by - do not follow good reef-diving ethics.

He kicks up sand with his fins and picks up coral to show me. I unwittingly break some dive ethics by tickling a turtle under its chin; it sleepily closes it eyes and appears to enjoy the attention. I later learn that I risk a fine of several hundred dollars for touching protected turtles.

Back in Waikiki there is another fresh-flower lei waiting for me on my hotel bed.

It is the sort of touch that the hotels of Hawaii do particularly well. The Outrigger chain, the largest in Hawaii, is no longer under the care of its founders Roy and Estelle Kelley, but it still follows their dictum of value within the reach of the average to middle-class traveller.

The sands of Waikiki reach to my hotel's rear courtyard. From my balcony I watch the rolling surf of Waikiki and the sun set over Diamond Head. And just along the beach, where in the evenings torches flame around hotel outdoor bar and pool areas and musicians strum guitars, are the mai tais. at Duke's Bar.

For the moment anyway, it's still the best eco-tour in Hawaii.

* Colin Moore went eco-touring in the Islands of Aloha courtesy of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Air New Zealand and Outrigger Hotels and Resorts.

CASENOTES:

GETTING THERE: Air New Zealand has eight flights to Honolulu each week, Air Pacific has three flights, Qantas nine flights and Canada 3000 two flights.

WHERE TO STAY: Outrigger Hotels and Resorts has a wide range of properties. Contact travel agent or ph (001808) 921 6839, or visit Outrigger.

WHAT TO DO: Eco tours with Mauka Makai Excursions, ph (001808) 593 3525, priced from
$US36.45 ($79) a half day a person. A Reef Adventure, ph (001808) 395 6133, scuba dive $US51 ; parasail, $US51 ; jet ski, $US46. Kailua Sailboards and Kayaks, ph (001808) 262 2555, kayak and sailboard rentals.