Spending the night at Kalaupapa is amazing. I grew up in a very rural location, and our house now is set well off the road, and is very quiet, but neither of these begins to compare to the tranquility of Kalaupapa.  Unless there is an activity which everyone is attending the entire town goes to bed early.  There is no distant traffic, no early flights at the airport, no murmur of late night businesses and parties: just the wind and the waves. You sleep deep, and wake early, to the sunshine spilling across the pali, highlighting each ravine in the cliff-face, and bathing the whole peninsula in a reflected glow. After breakfast and devotions (we were doubly lucky to be there on the Baha’i feast of Might – like Sabbath), we headed out into the sunshine, walking through the tiny township, past the gravesite of Mother Marianne Cope, who came with her nuns  to Moloka’i from upstate New York  in the 1880s to help Father Damien. Fifty other religious orders had turned down Hawai’i’s plea …

Yesterday I told you the history of Kalaupapa Peninsula, and I promised to tell you of my trip down to the Peninsula today.  As I tried to write this post, and select images to go with it, I realised I could never get all the words into one post, much less the images.  So this is part 1 of 2 of my trip – day 1. All my life, Kalaupapa was there: just over the mountain, just down the pali (cliff), visible from the lookout, as unreachable and unattainable as Paris, for all it was so many thousands of miles closer.  I couldn’t visit it as a child under 16, and as an adult I couldn’t visit it without an invitation from someone who lived and worked down on the peninsula, or as part of a tour.  I didn’t know anyone who worked at Kalaupapa, and I didn’t want to visit it as a tourist. Every trip home to Hawaii I thought of giving in, paying for a tour, and going down just to see …