This week’s travel dream: Hawaii’s cowboy country

When people picture Maui, they usually think of beaches, surf shacks, and waterfalls, said Freda Moon in The New York Times. They don’t think cowboys, or a cowboy culture older than any on the American mainland, but that means they’re forgetting a vast stretch of the island. Maui’s interior, known as Upcountry, is “another Hawaii”—a land of multigenerational cattle ranches, weekend line dances, and Fourth of July rodeos. It has arguably been cattle country since the 1790s, when a British explorer gave a handful of cattle to Kamehameha I, the first ruler of a unified Hawaii. Those cattle thrived: By the 1820s, their descendants were so numerous they’d run rampant, and Kamehameha’s son called in skilled horsemen from Mexico to contain them. Maui’s paniolo culture was born.

I happened to catch part of Maui’s big December rodeo last year. Before the event, a parade wound through downtown Makawao, featuring a high school band playing ukuleles, a tractor pulling Santa Claus on a trailer decorated with Japanese lanterns, and a rodeo queen on a white horse “waving at the crowd as if she knew every one of them.” (In this close-knit town of 7,000, she probably did.) My husband and I got our own mounts a couple of days later, when we took a horseback ride through a 40,000-acre ranch with Pony Express tours. “As we set off on our ride, a two-hour loop through the pastureland that blooms with fireworks-hued lantana, purple jacaranda, and white-blossomed pamakani,” dust from the trail coated our skin “with a fine red-brown powder.” “I go home with the greatest tan,” said Melissa, our guide. “But it just washes off.”

We ate well those days. At a local dairy, we enjoyed chèvre blended with fresh mangoes. And at O’o Farm, we harvested our own produce before sitting down to gently grilled mahimahi with purple dragon carrots and watermelon radishes. “But 10 days in the Upcountry wouldn’t be complete without tasting its most-prized product.” At the Makawao Steak House, the Hawaii-raised steak was all we’d hoped it would be, and our waitress seemed oddly familiar. To be fair, Melissa didn’t instantly recognize us either, not without our wash-off tans.

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At the Upcountry Bed and Breakfast (upcountrybandb.com), all rooms are $150.