The last two decades have brought golf courses and luxurious hotels, tourists and traffic to the second-largest Hawaiian isle. But the landscape surrounding Haleakala, the world's largest dormant volcano, remains preternatural in its loveliness. If you wanted to ruin the view, you could fit Manhattan inside its great volcanic bowl. All over the island, but particularly here, lush forests keep company with strikingly red and desert like terrain, and some of the flora and fauna are rare even in Hawaii. The stunning silversword plant grows only here and at high elevations on the Big Island. It will bloom just once in its life, near the end of its days. At Iao Valley State Park, wind and water have sculpted impressive rock spires. Mark Twain may not have thought much of Venice, but he was captivated by this place---and no wonder. All over Maui, rainbows hover over the mists and waterfalls shower the mountainsides. Hop aboard the charming 1890s Sugarcane Train and take a ride through the magnificent, lush landscape between Kaanapali, on the west coast, and Lahaina, the former whaling town that was once Hawaii's capital and is now the island's main market center. Sugarcane, a mainstay of Maui's economy for years, was a powerful influence on the island's history. Production ceased in 1999, but the train has happily outlived the crop. For local farmers the soil yields other bounties, among them grapes for wine and rich pasturelands where horses graze. The vineyards and grasslands create another kind of landscape on Maui, one that's intimate, charming and a perfect counterpoint to nature's grandstanding.

For 19th-century missionaries from New England, Hawaii represented a golden opportunity to save souls---not just Hawaiian souls but those of fellow New Englanders, whalers drawn to the Pacific by the big profits to be made on whalebone and whale oil. For these roistering mainlanders, Maui and its port of Lahaina were a red-light district where the bars never closed. The 19th-century buildings where they took their rowdy R&R have been renovated, and much of the town is now a National Historic Landmark. As for the North Pacific's humpback whale population, which once numbered many thousands, only about 1,500 remain. On winter whale-watching tours from Lahaina you can see them spectacularly breaching and blowing offshore. Under water, along the western and southwestern coasts, the sea yields still other spectacular sights. In the Molokini Crater area, a marine preserve, fish are so tame that they eat right out of a diver's hand. If you're not certified to dive, you can get an idea of the island's submarine wonders at the Maui Ocean Center in Maalaea. Back on land, West Maui's so-called Golf Coast, north of Lahaina, calls relentlessly to duffers. The velvety cliff-bound scenery may up your handi-cap by a stroke or two---the Wailea Golf Club is just one of the options. Still, just steering a car along a road can be a transcendent experience, as in East Maui on the winding Hana Highway, one of the most spectacular drives in the world. And it isn't just the hairpin turns that set your heart aflutter, although it might skip a beat or two when a car flies past, seemingly from out of nowhere. It's also the stops along the way---hikes to waterfalls that pour down to virtually deserted swimming holes, or Hookipa Beach, where windsurfers ride 15-foot-high waves and take their sport to world-class levels.