More than five years after the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered tours of Kalaupapa National Historical Park, Hawai‘i’s famed leprosy colony has reopened to the public.

Kalaupapa Saints Tours, operated by 90-year-old former Hansen’s disease patient Meli Watanuki, will offer limited access to the historical site starting later this month. 

There are only 10 scheduled tours this year with an eight-person cap. All 80 slots for the remainder of 2025 sold out in about 75 minutes, said Randy King, Seawind Tours & Travel founder and CEO who advises Watanuki. Wait lists are quickly filling up.

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.

Even after state health regulators lifted pandemic-era restrictions, the National Park Service continued to block public access while the agency developed a new tour permit approval process.

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. 

Whereas other national parks welcome millions of people annually, Kalaupapa has historically allowed a maximum of 100 daily visitors, including staff. The visitor cap has been reduced to 30 people a day, a decision that respects the privacy and lifestyle of former patients who still reside on the peninsula, Park Superintendent Nancy Holman said.

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 Watanuki and a non-patient who served as the company’s tour guide and bus driver. 

Watanuke was 18 when she was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease in her native American Samoa. She moved to Kalaupapa of her own volition after a second bout of illness in Honolulu in the 1960s left her abandoned by her husband and young son. Living in the settlement, she made friends and remarried.

Her tours are small to keep the peace among her fellow former patients and other residents, most of whom are employed by the National Park Service or the Hawaiʻi Department of Health. 

It’s paramount that visitors respect the painful history of Kalaupapa and the people who continue to live there, Watanuke said.

Protruding from Hawaiʻi’s steepest sea cliffs, Kalaupapa Peninsula is a windswept outpost with a difficult history as the place where thousands of people afflicted with Hansen’s disease were exiled to live apart from the rest of society.

The first exiles arrived on the remote peninsula in 1866. Conditions were so deplorable at that time that being exiled to Kalaupapa was synonymous with certain death. 

Three patients remain of the many former leprosy patients who chose to continue to live in Kalaupapa despite the 1969 repeal of the Hawai‘i law that exiled them there until death. One of them celebrated his 101st birthday in April. Another three former patients reside in Honolulu, where they can access more advanced medical care. Those still living on the peninsula receive support from the Hawaiʻi Department of Health.

For many of the former patients who chose to remain in Kalaupapa voluntarily as full-time residents, the peninsula was the only home they had ever known. Others had been abandoned by their family members outside the settlement.

All told, 8,000 patients were exiled to the remote Molokaʻi peninsula. “Interestingly, there’s only 1,300 grave markers,” tour guide Meadows said.

Kalaupapa is also the original resting place of saints, including Father Damien who devoted a third of his life to helping residents of the leprosy colony before he contracted the disfiguring disease and died in 1889.

When Damien’s remains were exhumed in 1936 and reburied in his native Belgium, Sister Alicia Damien Lau said the door to the trunk of the hearse inexplicably flung open on the roughly 4-mile drive from his burial site in Kalawao to the Kalaupapa airport.

“It was his soul jumping out because he wanted to stay in Kalaupapa,” Lau said.

Lau has been at Kalaupapa since 1965. She is one of two Catholic nuns who reside in Kalaupapa for the benefit of the last living resident patients.

“I’ll be here until the last patient is gone,” she said.