Hawaii: A Traveller’s Postcard

Posted on 09. Nov, 2009 by BCAA in International, Places, teaser

Never turn your back on the ocean, unless you are about to eat

by Rob Howatson

It is our first night at Kona Village Resort on Hawaii’s Big Island, where Leila and I have been assigned a window seat in the property’s quiet but elegant restaurant. As my wife scans the menu, I watch gentle waves roll across Kahuwai Bay, the surf faintly lit by a single floodlight strapped to a coconut tree.

Kona Village prides itself on being unplugged. Its 125 thatched-roof bungalows, arranged around a lagoon and black- and white-sand beaches, are tricked out like five-star hotel rooms – minus the distractions of air conditioning, televisions, radios and telephones. Walkways are lit by low-slung garden lights and the occasional tiki torch. Guests are issued flashlights to find their way after the evening festivities . . . or, as one young vacationer is now doing, to explore the tidal zone after sunset.

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“Did you see that?”

My wife glances up from the menu. “What?”

“In the water, just beyond the kid.”

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The eight-year-old is dressed in a crisply ironed shirt and pleated walking shorts, his blond mop perfectly combed. Earlier, he had been seated at the table next to us. Now, the beam of his flashlight bobbing erratically, he turns his back to the sea and stoops to examine a shell. As he does so, a blubbery, white, two-metre-long appendage rises from the water and flops about for a jarring moment before disappearing. The boy does not see the apparition. Neither does his family, happily chatting away in the restaurant.

“Did you see that?”

My wife glances up from the menu. “What?”

“In the water, just beyond the kid.”

I try to describe it, but the best I can do is confirm what I didn’t see. It wasn’t a whale. It wasn’t a shark’s fin. It wasn’t a squid’s tentacle.

“Hmm,” says Leila, returning her attention to the menu. “Calamari sounds good.”

Having logged a lot of vacation miles together, my wife is familiar with my nervous travel quirks. When we stayed in Hilo, for example, on the jungle side of the island, and the power went out as we prepared for bed, I sprang to my feet and began cranking our Wind ’N Go flashlight.

“Prepare the rental car for evacuation to higher ground,” I whispered into the darkness.

Leila rolled over and went to sleep. Apparently, she either didn’t know or didn’t care that Hilo had been flattened twice by tsunamis in the previous century, or that the city lies at the base of an active volcano, or that a week before our arrival, the Big Island had been rocked by a 6.7 earthquake. In fact, Leila slept particularly well that night. I popped a Zantac, stared at the ceiling and listened to the coqui frogs.

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The appendage, the two-metre limb,

the white blubbery thing, lifts again from

the water, within striking distance.

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After that episode, I vowed to relax. But it’s hard when a little boy is tinkering about in the dark beside the Pacific, oblivious to a lurking sea beast. The appendage, the two-metre limb, the white blubbery thing, lifts again from the water, within striking distance. The boy sees the creature and steps toward the bay to investigate. I scan the restaurant for our server, unsure of what to say even if he should materialize. “Kraken” is the only word that comes to mind – the monster in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. As in “Waiter, there’s a Kraken in my view.” As in, “Doesn’t the Kona coast possess one of the steepest offshore slopes in the Hawaiian Islands – a logical place for a leviathan to ascend?!” Leila senses I am about to do something spectacularly decisive and hides behind her menu.

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My flailing, untanned limbs propel me

out of the darkness and onto the barely illuminated

rocky landing with such force that the startled boy

nearly stumbles backward into the sea.

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I bolt from the restaurant and race across the lawn, singeing my hair on a tiki lamp as I round a corner. My flailing, untanned limbs propel me out of the darkness and onto the barely illuminated rocky landing with such force that the startled boy nearly stumbles backward into the sea. Whatever has been crashing about in the shallows is gone. But I notice, for the first time, a wooden sign: Please Do Not Swim with, Touch or Throw Rocks at the Manta Rays. I realize the coconut tree floodlight is meant to attract the gentle winged giants, which move slowly through the shallows and sometimes expose the white underside of a wing tip, as if waving hello. The boy shoots me a wary look and resumes beachcombing. I slink back to the restaurant, avoiding eye contact with his family, now crowded at the window. Leila peeks over her menu. I flash the “shaka” signal (back of the hand, pinky and thumb extended) – a Hawaiian greeting . . . and, of course, surfers’ code for “hang loose.”

Lead image courtesy Margaret Butschler/Vancouver Aquarium