HAWAIAAN LUAU SERVED IN EVENING
By Bob Van Leer

  (MAUI, HAWAII, MARCH 2, 1993) -We arrived at Kahului, Maui, at 7 this morning and entered the harbor. There is quite a bit more room than at the harbor on Kauai.

  Maui is called the Valley Island because it is basically two mountains connected by an eight mile wide isthmus. The main activity of the island is on the isthmus. Here are the port, airport, governmental center and much of the agriculture. The business and political heart of Maui is the Wailuku-Kahului area on the east side of the isthmus.

   Agriculture is a major industry with sugar cane the main product but there are still many acres of pineapple here and also Maui produces meat, vegetables and fruit.

  But the leading industry is tourism. About two million visitors a year come to Maui.

  We left the ship shortly after it docked for a bus tour taking us around much of the island with a couple of hours stop at Lahaina on the northwest coast. This city was the old royal capital and was a favorite stop for whaling vessels and a center for the early missionaries. Lahaina is no longer an important business and government location but has become a center of the tourist industry. Because Lahaina was bypassed it retains much of the architectural flavor of earlier years.

  Maui Is the second largest of the eight Hawaiian islands and its highest point is 10, 023 feet in elevation.

  In our tour of the island we watched giant trucks drop their load of 51 tons of sugar cane at the sugar factory. The cane fields are burned before harvest to get rid of dead leaves and junk and sanitize the fields. Field burning is still okay here.

  The south side of the island particularly has many acres of pineapple but, according to our guide, the future is uncertain. Dole is closing its pineapple operations on Lanai. Dole is operating in the Philippines where labor is $35-$45 per month instead of the $8.00 per hour paid in Hawaii.

  Pineapples take about the same amount of time as sugar cane for the first crop to mature - 18 to 22 months. There is a lot of hard labor - not all the pineapples mature at the same time and a field has to be picked several times.

  The same pineapple plant will yield a second, and maybe a third crop before replanting. But this first crop is the best.

  Our guide gave us several tips on pineapples. One is to thump a pineapple like a watermelon to determine ripeness. A deep, hollow sound is best. A high sound indicates it is not ready. He said if you wind up with a green, sour pineapple, prepare and slice it and sprinkle it with salt and this will help sweeten it.

  If you want to try growing your own from the top of a pineapple you bought, our guide said to twist, not cut, the top from the pineapple. Strip the lower leaves and put the top in a jar and put in water to just below the level of the remaining leaves. Keep the water level that way and after the plant develops a number of roots, plant it in a five gallon can with a dressing of all-purpose fertilizer. When it is growing, pineapples need a lot of nitrogen fertilizer. In our area it would be an inside crop except may on warm summer days. If you do everything, in about 15 months you should see a pinkish-reddish color inside the top which is the indicator a new pineapple is about to grow.

  North of Lahaina is Kaanapoli, a beach area that has developed into a resort hotel center. Our guide said the hotels were built for Americans but have been mostly sold to the Japanese. One is owned by Chinese.

  In the evening we were treated to a luau at a nearby hotel complete with roast pig.

  Dancers entertained us for an hour with native dances. But the star of the show was a Samoan who did a routine with two batons that would do credit to the best drum major. To make his act more interesting, the batons were on fire at both ends with flames a foot long.

  Tomorrow I'm going to rise before daylight to go on a snorkeling cruise to Molokai Island. It is the crescent shaped tip of a volcano that just barely made it to the surface. I couldn't interest any of the rest of the party in snorkeling. They elected to rent a car and explore the island on their own.