The Nuuanu Pali

The Nuʻuanu Pali is the great windward cliff of the Koʻolau range at the head of Nuʻuanu Valley on Oʻahu, and from the lookout of the Nuʻuanu Pali State Wayside the whole windward coast opens below, Kāneʻohe, its bay and Kailua, in famously strong trade winds. For a thousand years this low gap was the way across the mountains between the Honolulu side and the windward villages, and people lived along the trail up Nuʻuanu Valley the whole time.

In 1795 it became a battlefield. Kamehameha I sailed from Hawaiʻi Island with some 10,000 warriors, a handful of foreigners among them, took Maui and Molokaʻi and landed on Oʻahu. In Nuʻuanu Valley his army drove the defenders under Kalanikūpule back up the valley until they were trapped above the cliff, and many were forced over the edge. Roughly 400 warriors died in one of the bloodiest battles in Hawaiian history, and Oʻahu came under Kamehameha's rule. When workers widened the first road over the Pali into a highway in 1898, they found about 800 human skulls, believed to be the warriors who fell.

The pass was always a dangerous and sacred place. Two large stones near the back of the valley, Hapuʻu and Kalaehauola, were said to be goddesses guarding the way down the cliff; travellers left them flowers or kapa cloth for a safe journey, and parents buried their newborns' umbilical cords beneath them for protection. A moʻo wahine, a lizard who takes the form of a beautiful woman, is said to lead male travellers off the cliff, and meeting the Ghost Dog on the Pali meant turning back, or kaupe, disaster.

And there is the rule many in Hawaiʻi still keep: never carry pork over the Pali, especially at night. Pele, the volcano goddess, and Kamapuaʻa, the half-hog god, settled their quarrel by keeping to their own sides of the island, and pork carried across breaks the agreement. Drivers tell of cars that stalled on the highway and started again only once the pork went out of the window. When a television reporter set out to bust the legend in 2007 with a bag of manapua, the storyteller and guide Lopaka Kapanui later went back to the lookout to apologise.

The ghosts of the fallen warriors are said to walk the lookout at night, and Kapanui begins his tours there with a Hawaiian chant asking permission to enter. The old road is now a hiking trail, and since the late 1950s traffic has run through the Pali tunnels bored into the cliffside.