The Molokai Princess ferry takes ninety minutes to navigate the Kalohi Channel to Molokai. Molokai is the most Hawaiian of the islands—about forty percent of its seven thousand residents are native Hawaiian—and among the least touristed. There are few restaurants and only two hotels—the Hotel Molokai, near the harbor, a comfortable open-air colonial-looking outpost, and the more upscale, up-country Molokai Ranch (which also operates a tented beachside bungalow colony). There is no place to parasail or bungee jump or learn to scuba in a pool. It's not that there's nothing to do—though anyone who wants to make a sport of doing nothing would be well-advised to visit Molokai. It's that almost all the entertainments on the island are low-key and indigenous: hiking and paddling and biking and horseback riding and swimming. Tours of a coffee plantation and an organic macadamia nut farm. A mule trip to Kalaupapa Peninsula, the site of the historic leper colony.

Clare Mawae, who runs Molokai Outdoor Activities, meets us at the ferry dock. As Captain Roger told us, and as we are shortly to confirm, Clare is everyone's go-to gal on Molokai. Need a car (yes, you do), call Clare. Want to hike to the leper colony and fly out, call Clare. Looking for a massage therapist, call Clare. Thinking of kayaking the barrier reef or seeing the tallest sea cliffs in the world, call Clare. Want a hotel package that includes all of the above, call Clare.

"Want lunch?" Though it is only ten in the morning, Clare, a twelve-time national windsurfing champion, makes sure we'll be adequately provisioned for the trek into the rain forest that she's arranged for us to take with her dear friend "Uncle" Mervin. (In Hawaii, elders go by the honorific uncle or auntie.) We'll be driving inland, through fairly rugged terrain, then going by foot once we reach the Nature Conservancy's Kamakou Preserve, a couple thousand feet hence. The trip should take most of the day.

Though Molokai is only ten miles wide and thirty-eight miles long, its paucity of roads makes it feel much bigger and wilder, a throwback to what the Hawaiian Islands used to be. Uncle Mervin, who in his day raced outrigger canoes between his native Molokai and Oahu, steers the truck along old pineapple plantation paths cut through fields where he worked as a boy. (The pineapple companies pulled out about twenty years ago, and now there's nothing left to show that this was one of the world's biggest pineapple-producing regions.) He points out mesquite trees and cattle egrets and plovers and the red lehua flower which, he says, will cause the rain to come if we pick it.

It is not raining in the rain forest when we get there, but a cool, mobile mist distills the air. The ground is slick, so it's a relief to find a boardwalk covered with wire mesh. The boardwalk is narrow—think balance beam—and someone has thoughtfully left a quiver of walking sticks at the start. Uncle Mervin advises us to take one.