Most visitors assume the National Park Service runs tours to Kalaupapa, one of Hawaii’s most sacred and restricted places. It does not. Access has always depended on a long-standing patient-resident holding that authorization, and for the first time there is no living patient doing it.
Meli Watanuki, known across Molokai as Aunty Meli, was that person. She arrived at Kalaupapa as a Hansen’s disease patient, made the peninsula her home for decades, and late in her life fought to reopen it so others could witness what she and her community had lived. The first visitors in five years returned in September 2025.
I wanted to create a tour that not only shares the history, but also honors the people who lived it. This is my home, my story, and my gift to future generations. — Meli Watanuki
Meli died in May. Now there is no living patient managing public tours, and no one can yet say what will happen next. For anyone who has long hoped to see Kalaupapa, that is the whole problem. The ability to visit has always been tied to the people who lived this history, and with Aunty Meli gone, that is now in question.
The woman who brought Kalaupapa back.
Meili Watanuki was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease in American Samoa as a young woman. She moved to Kalaupapa in 1969, the same year Hawaii’s forced isolation policy ended, and spent decades building her life on the peninsula.
Many Beat of Hawaii readers and we authors know Kalaupapa through its dramatic sea cliffs, the legacy of St. Damien and St. Marianne Cope, and the extraordinary history preserved there. Fewer realize how much the patient-residents themselves have controlled who gets access to visit and on what terms.
That role became critical after the pandemic, when Kalaupapa closed in March 2020, and public tours stopped. Years passed without a clear path toward reopening, that is, until Watanuki stepped forward.
Working through the Kalaupapa Saints Tour in partnership with Seawind Tours and Travel, she became the patient-resident owner required to restart commercial access. The first public tour ran on September 24, 2025.
Demand was immediate. With only a limited number of tours scheduled since the reopening and just eight visitor seats on each aircraft departure, the dates sold out quickly. Yet for many Hawaii travelers, a door that had been completely shut for years had finally reopened, albeit differently.
Why her death affects future access.
Many visitors assume the National Park Service operates the Kalaupapa tours, but it does not. Public access has depended on this unusual arrangement between NPS, the Hawaii DOH, and patient-residents.
The Kalaupapa Saints Tour became the only park-authorized commercial operator after the reopening, and the Department of Health issues each visitor a Kalawao County entry permit through that operator. Visitors must be at least 16 years old and receive that permit before entering the settlement.
What faces Kalaupapa now is without precedent. As longtime Kalaupapa tour operator John McBride told Civil Beat, this is the first time there is no patient alive who is managing tours.
The National Park Service has said it is working with Meli Watanuki’s estate and tour operators on options to keep access open. The Hawaii Department of Health has said the Kalaupapa Saints Tour can keep operating through the end of 2026, so scheduled tours continue for now.
The longer-term question is unresolved. No one has said who, if anyone, could hold the patient-owner role once the current permit ends.
We’ve seen uncertainty at Kalaupapa before.
The concern is not new. Before the pandemic, two patient-owned tour operations made visits possible. But when Covid closed Kalaupapa and public tours stopped, the shutdown stretched far beyond the initial emergency, and visitors spent years waiting for any form of access to return.
The issue was never related to either transportation or demand. It was the structure itself, the rule that a patient-resident hold the commercial authorization, and for years no one did.
Visitors waited, and the peninsula remained closed. The reopening that finally arrived in 2025 happened because Watanuki stepped forward to fill a role no one else did, and her death raises familiar questions once again.
The story has been unfolding for years.
Beat of Hawaii has been writing about and visiting Kalaupapa for nearly two decades. When we visited and reported from the peninsula in 2012, the number of surviving patients was significantly larger than it is today.
By the time we returned years later, that population had declined sharply. Recent reporting puts the remaining former patients at only a few, with possibly just two still living at the settlement itself.
That question has long sat behind discussions about Kalaupapa’s future. Residents have consistently emphasized preserving their history and protecting the dignity of those who lived there, even as the generation that experienced it firsthand kept shrinking.
For years, the question of what happens after the patient generation is gone felt distant. That is no longer the case.
What Molokai visitors should know now.
Kalaupapa remains, without doubt, one of the most unusual visitor experiences anywhere in Hawaii. Current public access is limited to fly-in tours via Kalaupapa Airport, and every visit is tightly controlled.
There are no restaurants, shops, or visitor services like those found elsewhere in the islands. Privacy rules are strict, and photographing patient-residents or their property without written permission is prohibited.
For Molokai travelers unable to secure a permit, Palaau State Park, topside, remains the easiest way to see Kalaupapa from above. The overlook offers one of Hawaii’s most dramatic views of the peninsula without entering down into the settlement itself.
A future that remains unwritten.
Watanuki’s death closes an extraordinary chapter in Kalaupapa’s history. She reopened access after five years of closure, a responsibility few would have ever taken on.
The tours she helped create let visitors experience a place that is sacred, historically significant, and deeply personal to the people who call it home, and let a new generation learn about it firsthand rather than only read about it from afar.
Whether that access continues now rests with the National Park Service, the Department of Health, Watanuki’s estate, and the tour operators. Tours run under the current permit, but the larger question is the same one that has hung over Kalaupapa for years: how access will survive as the generation that lived this history grows smaller.
Have you made it to Kalaupapa, either before the pandemic or on one of the new fly-in tours with Aunty Meli? Tell us in the comments what the place meant to you, so others understand what is at stake here.
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