Haapsalu cheap hotel bookingMolokai Ranch has it all—the plash of sapphire waves on empty beaches, gorgeous vistas, a model ecotourism resort for the adventurous elite. So why are so many of the resort's Hawaiian neighbors fighting mad? And who's been burning and monkeywrenching in paradise?

By Joe Kane

FRANCO SALMOIRAGHI/PHOTO RESOURCE HAWAII

Where dreams collide: high cliffs on the northern coast of Molokai, Hawaii, far from the madding crowd

ON A CLEAR DAY on Molokai you can look 25 miles west across the Kaiwi Channel and see office towers glinting on Oahu. Ten miles east you can spy condos hugging Maui's western mountains like a stucco skirt. But in many ways you are as far from either island as you are from Tokyo or San Francisco.

There are no stoplights on Molokai. Its only real town, Kaunakakai, is three blocks long. True, there's a library, a medical clinic, a small hospital, and two grocery stores, but no building is taller than a coconut tree, and the shops are made of wood and tin and their floorboards creak with age. The cars in town are dusty and old and, here and there, abandoned in the front yards of tiny bungalows. Work is scarce. Unemployment hovers around 15 percent, about twice the state average.

Even so, Kaunakakai is a vibrant place. Though fewer than 7,000 people live on Molokai, many of them reside in the vicinity of "downtown." My first night there, people stood along the main street in twos and threes, talking story, and a crowd of 60 or so was gathered in front of the library, listening to Zack Helm and his teenage daughter, Raiatea ("Molokai's Rising New Falsetto Star," according to an island weekly). Zack played guitar, Raiatea sang, and most of the spectators appeared to be locals—that is, mainly of Native Hawaiian, Filipino, and Japanese blood. When Raiatea tore through the hiccupy, yodel-like high notes on a traditional Hawaiian song, the crowd erupted in cheers.

It's true, too, that you can find a chain store on Molokai, and a movie triplex, an expensive dinner, and that day's New York Times—but not in Kaunakakai. To indulge such tastes you must drive 17 miles west, through deserted pineapple fields and desiccated cattle range ridden with mesquitelike kiawe. At the end of the road is a sprawling "adventure" hideaway known as Molokai Ranch, where rooms run to $355 a night and guests spend their days mountain biking, kayaking, snorkeling, fishing, skeet-shooting, riding horses, and playing paniolo, or Hawaiian cowboy, with the Ranch's herd of Brahman-Angus cattle. Opened in 1995 and catering to a clientele that is, in the words of its sales director, "adventurous, affluent, with a base level of fitness," the resort is the centerpiece of the Ranch's 54,000 acres, which cover almost a third of Molokai. Its managers live in Honolulu and its owners in Singapore. Around Kaunakakai, I often heard the Ranch called "the other island," and regarded with suspicion, resentment, and even fear.

It wasn't always so. For more than 50 years the Ranch had been considered as fundamental to the island's way of life, and as inextricable from its future, as the sun. But that was before Big Pineapple pulled out and poverty settled in; before Big Money came ashore with bold plans for converting the Ranch into a resort and real estate empire—plans that threatened the island's limited resources, especially the tenuous supply of fresh water; and before a generation of Native Hawaiians rose up on Molokai and helped to ignite a movement for native rights throughout the state.

"This community can tell the whole world to go to hell if it wants to," Walter Ritte told me. Ritte, 56, is a Native Hawaiian who was raised on Molokai. (By legal definition, "native" describes those who can trace at least 50 percent of their bloodline to the Polynesians who occupied the islands before the arrival of whites in the 18th century, and about half of Molokai qualifies.) Ritte has twice been charged for acts of sabotage that did nearly a million dollars' worth of damage to Ranch property. When he looks into the future, he does not see himself astride a mountain bike guiding deep-pocketed mainlanders around the land he has hunted and fished since he was a child. "We are not servants," he said. "We are tightening our belts and laying siege to the Ranch, and one day it will run out of money and leave the island. Some people look at Honolulu and Maui and see jobs. We see slaves."

MOLOKAI IS THE FIFTH-LARGEST of the Hawaiian Islands. It is shaped something like a peanut, running 38 miles from east to west and, at its widest point, ten miles from north to south. No part of it is more than five miles from the ocean, and there is little level ground. Access to the long north shore is limited by fierce swells and currents and 14 miles of sheer sea cliffs that reach to 3,200 feet, making them the highest in the world. Inland, a steep, wet, heavily forested volcanic peak called Kamakou dominates the northeastern quadrant. As you descend Kamakou and move west, the island quickly dries out, and by the time you reach the much lower and gentler ridge called Mauna Loa, to the southwest—where most of the Molokai Ranch is—you're pretty much in a desert.

Last fall I checked in at the Ranch as a paying guest. The typical stay is hermetic: You land at the island's small airport and a Ranch van whisks you west to the lodge, a $14 million nouveau-rustic rendering of a traditional plantation Big House. With its unencumbered views of thousands of acres of red-dirt barrens descending to a blue Pacific, it fosters the illusion that you occupy an otherwise unoccupied island, your own private paradise. You sign a sheaf of releases the size of a dictionary, and then, if you're not staying at the lodge itself, you transfer to another van that takes you on a bone-rattling descent through locked gates and several miles of white-coral road to one of three adventure camps.

All of these camps are spectacular, but the best is Kaupoa, an enclave of 40 "tentalows"—each a luxe unit with queen-size bed, wine list, and room service—set on tidy green lawns beside a small cove and a secluded stretch of rocky beach. A host named Eddie transferred my bags to a golf cart and dropped me at Unit 19. Only three of the 40 units were occupied. The other two camps were shut down, and 20 of the 22 rooms at the lodge were empty. "We live and die with spring break," Eddie said.

My tentalow was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It resembled a small hotel room, except that it had canvas walls stretched over steel tubing, the whole structure riding on a wooden deck. A solar cell powered a ceiling fan and electric lights, and to one side of the deck stood a bathroom with a hot shower and a flush toilet. (To conserve water, the shower was operated by a spring-loaded pull cord, but a camp employee showed me how to jam the cord under the soap dish to keep the water running.) I found a robe, bath towels, shampoo, and organic mosquito repellent. The furnishings were of such quality that I was in the room a full 24 hours before I realized that what I had taken for a night table was a trash receptacle. In all, it was hugely comfortable and skillfully executed—as, I soon discovered, is almost every element of the Ranch. Over the next two days I kayaked, snorkeled, bodysurfed, hiked, ate well, slept well, and dropped a wad of dough.

One room at the lodge complex is devoted to a scale-relief model of American land developer (and later, Molokai Ranch CEO) Jim Mozley's controversial plan for the Ranch, the one Walter Ritte and a quite a few other Molokai residents have vowed to stop. Hundreds of houses fill what are now dusty fields. According to a 1996 report prepared for the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, no more than 33.5 million gallons of water per day can be drawn sustainably from the island, but projected demand for the Ranch and other proposed development on Molokai is 54 million gallons per day. (Some 24 million gallons of that would be needed by Native Hawaiians for domestic and agricultural use.)

An adequate water supply is the most critical element in Mozley's development plans—and its Achilles heel. In fact, water is the best measure of the collision course the people of Molokai and the Ranch are on. Much of the island's inhabited terrain, as well as nearly all of the Ranch's 54,000 acres, is as arid as Wyoming. That's in a good year, which Molokai hasn't had in a long time. The island is in the 15th year of a dry cycle and the third year of an official drought. The last two years were the driest in seven decades. By the best estimates I could find, Mozley's master plan for the Ranch will push the demand for water far beyond the island's sustainable yield.