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Waimea
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The
interior
of the Big Island comes as a surprise: pastoral meadows roll over gentle hills where once stood forests of sandalwood. This is cattle-ranching country, most of it - ten percent of the island - owned by the United States's largest private ranch, the
Parker Ranch
.
WAIMEA
(also known as
Kamuela
) is not the company town it once was - the Parker Ranch now employs just one hundred of its eight thousand inhabitants - but more of a sophisticated country-town resort, which retains traces of its cowboy past. Though you can no longer tour the ranch itself, the ranch has an interesting
visitor center
(Mon-Sat 9am-5pm; $6) in town; the nearby
Kamuela Museum
is enjoyably eclectic and eccentric, with an extensive range of ancient Hawaiian artifacts (daily 8am-5pm; $5). Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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United States,
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