The Big Island, my parents have always said, is the real Hawaii. They think this mostly because of Hilo, a former sugar community on the eastern side of the island (my parents, like many Asian Americans in Hawaii, are drawn to plantation towns, even though—or because—they themselves are just one generation off the plantation) where the parking meters still accept pennies and the orchid plants outnumber the humans. Tourists don't come to this side of the island very often—it's rainy and a bit shabby, and there are no good beaches. When Kilauea, which is an hour south, is erupting at its fiercest, a fug of silty volcano ash hangs over the town like an impenetrable thundercloud. Because of this, Hilo, with its bric-a-brac shops and storefront restaurants selling lumpy homemade sushi, can feel like its own island, a place preserved in amber, its pace so dialed back that the sight of someone wandering past with a cell phone to his ear can startle.

But this time, my mother and I skipped Hilo and Kona, home to sparkling blue waters and Saharan-yellow stretches of sand and clear, harsh skies, and drove northwest to the village of Hawi, near King Kamehameha's birthplace.

Hawaii is a place you drive through on your way to somewhere else, and although my mother and I were not on our way somewhere else—we were actually staying in town, in a small B&B that had just opened—we drove past it anyway. It was late afternoon, when Hawaii is at its prettiest and most alive: This is when the sun spangles most brightly against your windowpane, and the acacia trees throw dark, cutting shadows, and the flowers that bloom during the day begin to close and the ones that bloom at night begin to open, and the tide pounds toward the shore with its insistent roar. It is a moment of suspension, when the islands are the loveliest place in the world, timeless and out of time, and there is nowhere more fecund, or more colorful, or more perfectly composed than here. My mother slowed the car, and we pointed out to each other not things either of us remembered—neither she nor I had ever been this far north—but everything around us, all of which seemed new and vivid in the rich light: the spectacularly ugly sausage trees, with their grotesque, phallic seed pods; the thickets of yellow ginger growing wild and stalky as yellow bamboo by the roadside; someone's rooster nodding and scratching, its feathers glossy black against all that green.

We got out at the place where the road ended: Pololu Valley Overlook, just past the northern tip of the island, which offers one of those views that make you feel grateful to be alive. To our right was the mountain, so thickly blanketed with trees that it looked furred, and below us was the water, improbably blue, whose waves folded into pleats against a beach of coarse black sand. Around us was birdsong and extravagant greenery.

There was nothing really to say to each other, and so we stood there in silence. I felt then what everyone must feel the first time they see Hawaii—wonder that it exists, admiration that it was named and settled and cultivated so long ago by the people who first came here, gratitude that I was getting to stand there now. It is the same awe that centuries of visitors to Hawaii have felt, from the people who tried to claim it and the people who tried to keep it theirs—it is that fellow-feeling which all of us who have been to Hawaii crave forever after, even if the sensation, from lack of practice, can elude us sometimes. Hawaii may be only fifty by the U.S. government's tally, but it is much older, and more unknowable, than that—a place which, as I now know, can still enrapture and seduce, if you know where to look. It is that feeling I used to have even when I lived in Hawaii, a sadness because I knew I would someday have to leave it, and no place, no matter how much I traveled and looked, would ever be as beautiful as the place I was in now.

"We're home," my mother said with a sigh, and leaned against me, and I nodded. She was right. And then we turned back to the car and left.

Since this writing, Condé Nast Traveler has learned that Trump International Hotel Waikiki will open in November 2009 as planned, according to Trump Hotel Collection.