Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2006

Perceptions of Paradise
By: Christine Thomas

Travels with writers in the Islands

Upon his arrival for a short visit to Hawai‘i in February 1941, Ernest Hem­ingway is said to have remarked that the place was “a dung heap,” that the stack of lei placed around his neck was “filthy” and that he couldn’t bear to have someone say aloha to him one more time.

That’s what his third wife, Martha Gell­horn, reported in her memoir, Travels with Myself and Another: Five Journeys from Hell. Even though I’m not Hemingway’s most ardent fan and certainly don’t agree with his assessment, I like this revelation because it does exactly what powerful travel writing ac­complishes—it delivers me not only to a place and time, but inside the mind of a traveler, allowing me to see the location just as he did. It also allows me to do some­thing impossible in this place where I was born—to ar­rive in Ha­wai‘i for the first time.

In that moment I shed my 30 years as a woman and become a beefy man in my early 40s, wiping the sweat from my neck and adjusting my hat as I exit a Matson liner from San Francisco, walking through a horde of re­porters and photographers, carrying my own camera and briefcase, wary both of lei greeters before me and slick, emerald mountains in the distance. I have no idea that at the end of this year the harbor nearby will be bombed and I will soon be a correspondent in another war. At this point, I’m writing my own fictional travel narrative from the bits Hemingway has provided and—could it be?—with which he has incited me. I never thought he’d be an inspiration, but what can I say? Travel writing can be as transformative as travel itself.

Many modern writers have found their muses in the Hawaiian landscape, including Japanese fiction master Ha­ruki Murakami and American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux. But since I live in modern Hawai‘i, I decided to revisit some of the pillars of Ha­wai‘i’s past. Upon opening any of the travel texts of, say, Mark Twain, Isabel­la Bird or Jack London, I am plunged into foreigners’ virginal perceptions of paradise, and also their judgments of a people and a way of life they could only view through a Western lens. Mark Twain spent four months in the Islands in 1866, when he was 31 and not yet famous. What’s most interesting about his 25 letters collected in Rough­ing It in the Sandwich Islands, written on assignment for the Sacra­mento Daily Union, is not the humor for which he is often lauded, and with which I have trouble connecting (apart from his exaggerations about the size of local in­sects); it is instead his moments of lyrical de­scription, revealing a reverence for the Is­lands that belies his obvious cultural bias. Just one example is his stunning yet subtle observation of a tiny square of rainbow “drifting about the heavens … like stained cathedral windows.”

Even when he criticizes Hawai‘i’s out­landish landscape, his observations allow me to see anew the backdrop of my life, such as the ubiquitous palm tree, which he wrote “looked like a feather-duster struck by lightning.” Though I may question his other, too-easy assessments, particularly his as­sump­tion that what he describes as unselfish natives saved by the ar­rival of Christianity, in all my years I’ve never thought of a palm tree looking like a feather-duster, and perhaps never would had I not read his account.

Isabella Bird, often described as a “cultural tourist,” spent six months in Hawai‘i in 1873 for the benefit of the clime on her health. Like many who as­sert that they are travelers, not tourists, Bird wasn’t looking for entertainment, but experiences off the beaten path. She stayed long enough to become en­tranced, and knowledgeable enough to write about them. “I love them better every day,” she wrote of the Islands, “and dreams of Fatherland are growing fainter in this perfumed air and under this glittering sky.” Rather than remaining on the edge of Hawaiian life, Bird immersed herself in it, so much so that it became emotionally difficult for her to leave, as it has always been for me.

When I was on the Mainland for college, I couldn’t wait to come home for a visit. I was always dispirited on the way back to the airport. Sitting on the plane in Hono­lulu, I felt spiritually and physically ripped from the warmth of one world and forced into the cold of another far away, though the flight to California is a mere five hours. One of the things I like best about living in Hawai‘i again—I moved home unexpectedly three years ago—is that, when I do travel, I obtain the rush of adventure alongside the com­fort of knowing exactly when I will return.

The honorary kama‘äina Jack London likens this kind of love of Hawai‘i to falling in love with a woman. “One cannot de­termine in advance to love a particular woman,” he opines, “nor can one so determine to love Hawai‘i. One sees, and one loves or one does not love. With Hawai‘i it seems always to be love at first sight. Those for whom the Islands were made, or who were made for the Islands, are swept off their feet in the first moments of meeting, em­brace and are embraced.” He was clearly not thinking of Hemingway here, nor of visitors who arrive expecting America and end up reeling with culture shock from, among other differences, being unable to pronounce the street names.

I suppose, for me, Hawai‘i was love at first sight, though my first glimpse of O‘ahu was as a newborn. Yet, even though I love my home, I also have an insatiable thirst for travel. Reading was my introduction and first opportunity to explore, and, like so many others, I was first a mental traveler. It wasn’t until I traveled physically, initally to other is­lands, then the Mainland, and finally abroad, that I could at last “see” what others had written about. Growing up, I always realized that, if I never left, I would renounce something I had yet to experience in favor of that which I un­der­stood intimately. I knew I had to leave in order to appreciate what I had. As the old Hawaiian proverb points out, one cannot see the beauty of a birthplace until one has left it.

Hawaiians were innate travelers. Just look at their astounding feats of ocean navigation, wayfinding on sailing ca­noes through knowledge of the sea, the stars, the birds, the sun—drawing the islands to them even in moments of blindness. Of course, it could be said that their original voyagers were gods and goddesses. Maui could literally lasso planets in the sky, so traveling was a snap. Pele could even journey while she slept, and send her sister Hi‘iaka out to fetch things (usually men) from other islands. The Hi‘iaka and Pele chants could be considered some of Ha­wai‘i’s first travel literature, and Hi‘iaka surely one of the first travel chroniclers. (Read more about her on page 66.) Known as “the woman who made a circuit of the Islands,” her remarks upon her travels are now proverbs.

In the introduction to a modern collection of travel writing, Hawai‘i: True Stories of the Island Spirit, Rick and Marcie Carroll, the editors, assert that what travelers absorb while in the Is­lands is difficult, if not impossible, to express in writing. “It’s always been so,” they argue. “The ancients left their legacy in chants and dances, stories passed down by spoken word … or by hula, another passed-down tradition that de­fies writing.” Yet, when I dance hula, its connection to what I do on the page is undeniable. Through the dance, I can tell a story using the motion of my hands, the position of my feet, and, yes, the sway of my hips. I can travel back in time just as I do when I read a book. At their cores, the experiences are more alike than disparate.

Traveling is not merely going from one place to another, and writing about it is not merely recording what happen­ed. When I visit Berkeley, where I went to college, to me that is not traveling, but for someone else it might be. When I find time to again travel to England, where I also used to live, it will likely be more a homecoming than a new adventure. Perhaps that is because traveling is a way of seeing the world, a mental ex­ploration: It originates inside. As Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel, says, “The pleasure derived from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to.”

When I travel, it is to get outside of myself, to leave my normal constructions behind, shed the skin of my re­sponsibilities and unmask different parts of myself through immersion in a new way of life. I don’t have to be ac­countable and driven and health-conscious; I can smoke if I want to, eat entirely too much and spend the day with strangers until I decide I just want to go somewhere else. As someone who usually travels alone, I introspect, ob­serve, lose and then find myself again. Of course, I also spend a great deal of time reading and writing.

De Botton also suggests, “if only we could apply the traveling mind-set to our own locales, we might find them just as, if not more interesting than the outer realms we seek.” So when I went to Maui recently for a friend’s baby lü‘au, I decided to take his advice. I arrived at the airport where I’ve been hundreds of times, heading to an island I’ve been to on countless occasions. But this time I resisted my normal urge to sit down in anonymity and read a book I am paid to review. Instead, I left work be­hind, walked into the bar and ordered a beer, just to do something opposite of what I would normally do—just as if I were really traveling. I struck up a conversation with three men next to me who were from the west side of the island (I’m from the east), my tendency to hang out only with the small circle of friends I grew up with melting away.

I hadn’t even left yet and already I had expanded. I was far away. On the airplane, I sat near my new friends and then began a conversation with another man next to me. I peered down at the wash of green and blue instead of assuming I’d seen it all be­fore. When we landed 20 minutes later, I realized that, although I’d not gone far, I’d succeeded in leaving my world behind—the very moment I decided that I was not just getting on a plane, but mentally, spiritually and, incidentally, physically, I was going to travel.

Of course, the first thing I did when I returned home was write about it.

CHRISTINE THOMAS is an O‘ahu-based writer currently traveling the world with the characters of her short fiction collection in progress. She also writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle. Visit her at literarylotus.blogspot.com



In February 1941, three months after they married in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railway at Cheyenne, Wyo., Ernest Hemingway and his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, arrived at 8 a.m. in Honolulu on the S.S. Matsonia from San Francisco. On arrival, it was about 80 degrees and Hemingway wore a heavy jacket reinforced with leather patches. He was 40; she was 32. They were on their way to Hong Kong and China, on assignment for Mainland newspapers and magazines. During their 12 days in Honolulu, they stayed in a beachfront cottage at the Halekülani Hotel. Interviewed by the local press, Hemingway said, “This is our first interlude we’ve had together since our marriage, and we want to spend it together. But we would like to do a little fishing.”

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