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A Catholic priest from New York reached out to a small Oahu-based travel agency last year to book an early February tour for 26 pilgrims to visit the original resting place of Saint Damien at Molokai’s Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

Nikodem Pikor of Hawaii Polonia Tours answered the call and said he tried to hire the Saints Damien and Marianne Cope Molokai Tours company to guide the Catholic pilgrims on a visit to the national park. He quickly learned that Kalaupapa was closed indefinitely to visitors.

The pastor was extremely disappointed when Pikor told him his group would not be permitted to walk in the footsteps of saints who dedicated their lives to caring for Hansen’s disease patients in Kalaupapa despite risks to their own health. He could offer the priest little explanation.

“I told him what I was told, which is that the tours are frozen, there are no approved tour providers and there’s no process for tour operators to apply,” Pikor said. “He was just baffled. He, like so many others, perceives this place to be of such importance, of such value, a place of historical memory, that blocking the possibility to visit it without providing reasonable explanation or timeframe, this is not acceptable.”

Four years after the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered tours of , Hawaii’s famed leprosy colony remains off-limits to the public.

Molokai’s top tourist destination closed in early March 2020 under pandemic-era public health restrictions far stricter than those enacted in the rest of the state. A blanket no-visitor policy meant that former Hansen’s disease patients, as well as National Park staff and scientists who live on the secluded Kalaupapa peninsula, could not receive visits from family and friends. Gatherings were forbidden in groups larger than five, even outdoors. Participants in smaller gatherings had to wear masks and stay 6 feet apart.

Those rules endured for more than three years, leading some former patients to beg for hugs even as much of the rest of the world was growing to accept Covid-19 as a manageable part of everyday life.

Today there are no longer any pandemic-era restrictions in Kalaupapa. The Hawaii Department of Health, which co-manages the Kalaupapa peninsula with the National Park Service, says it has no rules in place prohibiting the resumption of commercial tours.

Now, it’s the National Park Service that’s blocking public access. 

NPS does not facilitate its own tours of Kalaupapa. But the agency has the power to approve tour providers owned by Hansen’s disease patients who reside on the peninsula. The NPS is required to offer this business opportunity to patient-residents until no more are interested.  

The park service presently has no approved tour provider, however. John McBride, co-owner of a tour company that operated in Kalaupapa before the pandemic closure, said his company cannot re-apply for the commercial use authorization it needs to operate from the NPS because the application process is frozen.

“There is no process,” McBride said. “There’s demand for the tours, we want to start up tours again, but there’s no way to apply.”

The NPS is developing a new approval process to “address concerns and work through issues,” according to Miki’ala Pescaia, a ranger. Pescaia did not elaborate on the nature of those concerns and issues, however.

“We are so close!” she said in an email. “We understand the public is anxious to return to Kalaupapa as soon as possible, and so are we.”

Park Superintendent Nancy Holman did not respond to a request for further details about changes to the approval process and she did not offer an estimated timeline for tours to resume. 

She said in an email: “Park staff and DOH are working through the process of securing a new tour operator to again be able to provide limited visitor access. When we have an update on resuming tours, the NPS will alert the public and media and update our website with details. ”

Hawaii Health Department Director Kenneth Fink said in a letter that NPS is expected to re-start commercial tours sometime in 2024.

Beginning in 1865, thousands of people afflicted with Hansen’s disease were banished to live segregated from the rest of society on the Kalaupapa peninsula. Conditions were so deplorable in the early and mid-1800s that being cast off to Kalaupapa was synonymous with certain death.

Eight of Kalaupapa’s former Hansen disease patients are living. Five of them choose to reside in the settlement full-time with support from the state Department of Health, which provides them with furnished homes, nursing staff and stipends for food and clothing, despite the 1969 repeal of the Hawaii law that exiled them there until death.

Whereas other national parks welcome millions of people annually, Kalaupapa has historically allowed a maximum of 100 daily visitors, including staff. Visitors must secure a permit to access the secluded park and no one under age 16 is allowed to enter.

Before the pandemic, there were two approved patient-owned tour providers. One of those companies, Kekaula Tours, is defunct. Former patient Clarence “Boogie” Kahilihiwa owned the tour company until he died at age 79 in 2021. 

The other tour provider was Saints Damien and Marianne Cope Molokai Tours, which is co-owned by former patient Meli Watanuki and McBride, a non-patient who served as the company’s tour guide and bus driver. 

Watanuki, who is 89, told Civil Beat last year that she is eager to resume her company’s tour services. She expressed frustration at the years-long ban on welcoming visitors to the peninsula. 

Her business partner McBride is more blunt: “How is it affecting me? Horrible. The demand is there. I get calls all the time. People from Europe, local families, Catholics — they all want to go and I have to tell them no.”

McBride said he understands that NPS takes issue with the fact he is not a patient, even though he partners with Watanuki. He argues that the partnership is within the bounds of the strict regulations governing the peninsula, which is incorporated as Kalawao County and co-managed by the NPS and the state health department. 

“It’s a difficult thing because it’s not just working with one government agency,” McBride said. “I got to work with two of them, and both of them are not on the same page. It’s like working with two kids in kindergarten. You go to one, they blame the other one. You go to the other side, they say, ‘Oh, no, we didn’t say that.’”

He says Watanuki wants to operate tours, which is her right, but she likely wouldn’t be able to do so without his help.