Experience the best of Lanai

Lanai is the sixth largest of the Hawaiian Islands, a dry, windy island in the rain shadow of Maui, from which it is separated by a narrow channel. It was planted with pineapple for much of the twentieth century, and Lanai City, a plantation town of cottages and Norfolk pines on a plateau about 500 metres high, is still its only town. Most of the island is reached by dirt roads across red earth.

Hulopoe Bay on the south coast has a white beach in a marine preserve where spinner dolphins sometimes enter the bay, and Puu Pehe, a sea stack known as Sweetheart Rock, stands just offshore. In the north-west, the Garden of the Gods is a plateau of strange red rocks and boulders, and on the north shore Shipwreck Beach is named for a rusting wreck on the reef. The ruins of Kaunolu, an old fishing village, lie in the south-west.

Fresh fish, poke, shave ice and plate lunches fill the few cafés in town. The weather is warm, dry and breezy through most of the year, and humpback whales pass the coast in winter.