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In 1866 a relatively unknown journalist by the name of Samuel Clemens - better known now as Mark Twain - arrived in what were then the Sandwich Islands to write a series of Letters From Hawaii for the Sacramento Union newspaper. He intended to stay a month but wound up spending nearer six. "If I could have my way," he wrote later, "I would go back there and remain the rest of my days."

Now he'd probably jump on the next boat out, after one look at what has become of islands like Oahu, home to Honolulu’s concrete forest of high-rise hotels, and Maui, both of which have surrendered large chunks of their Hawaiian soul to the tourist dollar. But the main island of Hawaii itself would still make him linger. Generally known as Big Island - both to avoid confusing tourists who equate 'Hawaii' with Oahu and because it’s twice as big as all the other islands put together - you’ll still find much of the relaxed beauty that hooked Twain.

This is especially true on the windward, eastern side. Twain described the view from the top of Mauna Loa - the “long mountain that had neither beginning or end” in his apt words - as taking in “all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye”, and Big Island’s charmingly ramshackle capital Hilo provides an ideal base to explore this dazzling array of landscapes, as well as two fine museums in the historical Lyman Museum and the Pacific Tsunami Museum - ask a local to point out one of the town’s tidal wave warning sirens.

Rainforest covers the hills and valleys of Waipi’o, where you criss-cross old sugar plantation irrigation channels walking through clouds and bamboo stands, Western fantasies loom large on the rolling grassland around Waimea that is home to the paniolos, local cowboys bred from a hardy mix of Hawaiian, Japanese and Mexican stock, while for the truly cosmic head for the observatory-covered summit of Mauna Kea (you’ll need 4WD for the final unsurfaced stretch to the top) where the view 16,000 feet up will take your breath away as much as the cold thin air of the clearest skies on Earth.

And then there’s Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano both now and when Twain mule-trekked his way up its slopes in 1866. Native Hawaiians (kanaka) still make sacrifices to the fire goddess Pele whose home this is - gin is one of the lady’s favourites - and it’s a respect you understand passing the island’s countless lava flows, which Twain called “the accumulation of ages, one torrent of fire after another”.

Kilauea’s present outpourings are impressive enough as Pele’s molten rock pushes back the Pacific in an awesome collision of opposites that is creating a new coastal plain of dark, twisted lava to the south of the volcano. But it was in even more fiery mood in 1866 when Twain stood above the vast Halemaumau crater gazing at skeins of molten lava he compared to “a colossal railroad map of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky”.

But Twain devoted as much space to the lifestyle of the place rather than specific sites, and the ‘country-style’ towns scattered around the island still have much to appeal - the wooden boardwalks, time-warp general stores, clapboard churches perched high above the Pacific and old diners whose menus reflect an island where half the population is either Polynesian or Asian.

The irony is how little Big Island acknowledges Twain’s visit, apart from Mark Twain Square in the little town of Wai’ohinu, a few miles from the southernmost point in the USA - still little more than the “dozen houses” Twain recalled when he bought a mule here for $15 to take him to Kilauea . It’s not much of a memorial, but then even Cook only got a plaque and a modest obelisk to mark the spot where he died at Kealakekua Bay.

But continue in Twain’s footsteps back up the Kona coast and you come to one of the most evocative places in the Hawaiian islands - Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, the Place of Refuge. “The outlawed criminal flying through pathless forests and over mountains and plains” was how Twain described those who fled here, a place where the condemned could earn pardon by proving their fitness to survive, dodging avenging warriors on land and sharks by sea to reach this isolated sanctuary.

I sat here on my final day, beside fearsome wooden idols, amid palm trees and the huge black platforms and walls made from lava rock, and watched as the sun sank towards the Pacific, alone by the tiny bay apart from a lone turtle swimming seaward with lumbering elegance. Big Island might not be quite Twain’s Paradise anymore but there’s still plenty to inspire anyone’s Letters From Hawaii.

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