I had never been to the Big Island, and the reason was my wife.
She had been twice when she was younger and had come away unenthused, without ever producing a specific charge against the place. I talked her into going. I am glad I did. It is now one of my favourite Hawaiian islands, and the one that least resembles the others.
The landscape is the thing. Having been to Maui, Oahu and Kauai, I expected a variation on a theme and got something else entirely: dramatically barren, unmistakably volcanic, and lovely in a way that has nothing to do with lushness. Black rock to the horizon, and then the water.
Arriving
We flew Alaska nonstop and picked up a rental car, and it is a short run from the airport to Hualalai.
The resort sits inside a much larger residential development of houses, condos and golf courses, and the approach is a winding road down toward the ocean that takes its time. You pass the houses and the fairways on the way in, which is a pleasant and faintly voyeuristic overture.
At the bottom are the trees. Monkeypods, with the wide umbrella crowns that make them the signature shade tree of the islands, thrown out far enough to cover the arrival court entirely. Check-in happens on a second-floor open-air lobby, open on three of its four sides, so the first thing that reaches you is the air off the water.
The room had clearly been renovated in the last few years: island modern, dark woods, teak and mahogany, and very well done.
Water, and which water
The Four Seasons at Hualalai is laid out as a set of distinct villages, and each village has its own pool.
This matters more than it sounds. The beach is not really built for swimming in the traditional sense, and at most resorts that would be a mark against the property. Here it is irrelevant, because you have your pick of at least three pools plus a large saltwater lagoon stocked with fish and other sea creatures. The infinity-edge pool above the lagoon has recently been redone. There are several hot tubs, which is the amenity I always end up grateful for.
We started at the main pool on the first day and never ran out of options.
The service, which is the actual product
We ate at every restaurant on the property and the food was uniformly excellent, but food is not what separates a Four Seasons from its competitors.
Service is. You sit by the pool and small things keep arriving: snacks, drinks, and at one point someone appears to clean your sunglasses. No one asks whether you would like any of it. It simply happens, at the right interval, by people who have evidently been trained to read a lounger from thirty feet away. That is a difficult thing to build and an easy thing to notice.
Golf, and the hour before dawn
I played Hualalai and found the course immaculate. It was my first round in a while, and eighteen holes in that condition is a generous way to come back to the game.
The better discovery was running. I would get up before dawn and take the beach path, then head up into the Hualalai development, and on some mornings carry on next door into Kukio. There is a particular pleasure in having a place that expensive entirely to yourself because everyone else is asleep.
One morning I passed another runner, recognised him instantly as an actor whose work I have admired for years, and said nothing about it. He struck up a conversation anyway. We talked for several minutes and he was gracious and entirely unaffected, and I spent the whole exchange pretending I had no idea who he was. Months later I saw him on a sideline at a college football game, talking to somebody with exactly the same easy warmth, and thought: yes, that tracks. That is just who he is.
The one day we left
We spent nearly the whole week on the property. The single exception was a drive down to the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel, which I wanted to see.
It is one of the grande dames of the Big Island — developed by Laurance Rockefeller and opened in July 1965, designed by Edward Charles Bassett of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and built open to the trade winds rather than sealed against them. The AIA gave it an honour award in 1967 for its restrained detailing. It still reads as a serious building rather than a resort that happens to be old.
We had lunch there and spent a couple of hours on the beach. It was worth leaving for — not because Hualalai lacked anything, but because an hour in the car and a look at a different hotel is its own small pleasure on a week otherwise spent inside one set of gates.