When I drive down the highway from Maui’s rural upcountry into what we call town, the tallest building in Kahului often looms like a white shining castle in the distance. More than 14 stories high, it gleams in the sunlight, row after row of glass windows, with several towers rising up like antennae. Its curved exterior walls are so bright and white and gleaming that the low-rise industrial town of Kahului seems pale and faded and rather shabby beside it — Maui’s main port city is dwarfed by its presence.
“There it is,” I sometimes joke with my kids in the car. “The tallest building in Kahului.” Except on the days when it’s gone. Some days it literally vanishes like a mirage in the haze. Poof. Because Kahului’s tallest building is not a building at all: It’s one of the massive cruise ships that docks in the harbor several days of the week.
Down at the harbor, a cruise ship belches out its 2,000 passengers, who then scatter to the far corners of the island: the resort towns of Kīhei, Wailea, Kāʻanapali, Nāpili. Some get into rental cars and tour vans and head out on the narrow, winding two-lane road of the Hāna Highway, which is increasingly clogged with traffic and illegally parked cars as tourists jump out to take selfies at waterfalls.
This relentless barrage of visitors adds to those arriving on jets all through the day. More than 2 million visitors every year engulf this mostly rural island of only around 160,000 residents. It feels intense at times, overwhelming, like a human tsunami.
And it’s not just the human bodies that overwhelm us — it’s the ideas, the expectations, the fantasies that many visitors bring with them, fantasies the island and its inhabitants are supposed to fulfill. The relationship often feels less like host and guest, and more like puppet and paying customer.
I have been one of those puppets. I grew up dancing in a hula halau, a Hawaiian dance school, and along with practicing the traditional movements and storytelling of kahiko, we sometimes raised money by performing modern hula for tourists in Waikīkī. Eight years old, swinging my ti leaf skirt, I danced with my younger sister, only six, before a hooting, hollering crowd. They threw crumpled up dollar bills at our feet.
Nearly half of Maui County’s jobs are related to tourism. About 70 cents of every dollar earned on Maui is somehow tied to this tsunami of visitors. We need them. Many locals resent this, but we do. And until we figure out a more sustainable solution we’re stuck, shaking our ti leaf skirts for crumpled up dollars. And when the flow of visitors slows or stops — as it did during the pandemic, or after the big Maui fires — the island’s economy evaporates. Poof. Just like the cruise ship.
I will say that on the days when the cruise ship is gone from Kahului harbor, we’re almost disappointed. A bit lost, disoriented, searching the horizon for a new focal point. Without the gleaming white ship, what do we look for? How will we find our way across town? On those days it takes a moment, but we soon stop searching for a glimpse of its bright and shiny presence — it’s just steel and plexiglass and paint, after all.
We slowly reorient ourselves to the actual neighborhoods and streets, the intersections and crosswalks of our town. We see the great big, blue Pacific that surrounds us, the forested peaks of the West Maui Mountains in the distance, the grand summit of Mauna Kahālāwai, the green folds of ʻĪao Valley, and the hulk of Haleakalā at our backs. We remember where we are, and how lucky we are just to be here.
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