Forget the Track for a Week: The Big Island Has the Best Public Roads in America

Every driving enthusiast keeps a mental list of roads worth flying for. The Big Island of Hawaii belongs on it, and hardly anyone puts it there. Most visitors treat the island as a beach with a volcano attached and never clock that the drives between the sights are the real event. Sea-level lava desert, alpine switchbacks climbing toward 14,000 feet, ranch country that looks like Montana, coastline that goes gold at sunset, all of it linked by roads that stay empty most of the day.

The geography does you a favor here. The island is about the size of Connecticut, and the highlights sit an hour or two apart, so unlike a lot of destinations, you’re rewarded for driving rather than punished for it. Two roads alone justify the trip. The Queen Kaahumanu Highway runs north out of Kona across miles of black lava that turns amber near sunset with the ocean flat beside you. The Kohala Mountain Road climbs into green ranch land with the water showing on both sides for a solid twenty minutes. Neither has traffic worth mentioning. Both are better with the windows down.

Where the trip can go sideways is the airport, and it’s worth knowing before you land. Kona International is small and open-air, which sounds great until you reach the rental counters. Reviews over the past year describe waits past four hours at the national desks in peak season, prepaid customers stuck in the same line, the queue running out the door. Rough way to start a driving holiday. The move that regulars make is to skip the counter model entirely. Book a car rental at KOA airport through an independent operator and the car is simply waiting when you land, keys ready, no line and no shuttle to an off-site lot, and a lot of them will run it out to your hotel instead if that suits the plan.

The other advantage of going local is the machinery. The national counters hand you whatever’s on the lot. A good local Kona car rental company will actually put you in something you want to drive these roads in, from open-top convertibles for the coast to properly capable four-wheel-drive vehicles for the high country, and it tends to cost less than the equivalent on Maui. If you care what you’re driving, that difference matters more than the nightly rate.

One thing every enthusiast should know before targeting the big one: Mauna Kea. The summit road above the visitor station requires four-wheel drive, rangers check, and nearly every national chain forbids that road in the rental contract, so a counter SUV upgrade still legally can’t make the climb. The drive to the summit for sunset and the observatory-grade night sky is the single most memorable drive on the island, and reaching it means a proper 4×4 from a local outfit that permits the road, arranged in advance.

Sort the car first, and the Big Island turns into a week of the kind of driving you normally have to book a track day for, except the scenery is doing the work. Check your mileage terms before you pull out, because a full island loop runs around 200 miles before you add the good detours, and you will add the good detours.