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IF IT'S TEN YEARS, THIS MUST BE HAWAII
Chuck And Sue And Ken And Deborah On The Big Island 

PART THREE

The first morning of our stay, we had attended an orientation conducted by the Hilton folks. It was designed to let us know about the many non-Pokemon-related recreational opportunities available on the Big Island. I asked the presenter for a recommendation for a good snorkeling location, but I had to lie and say I was asking on behalf of someone else to get the conscientious presenter to suggest any location other than my hotel room tub. She finally suggested Kahalu'u Beach, located down the coast from the resort.

This was perfect, since the Greenwell Farms coffee plantation was relatively nearby. Sue and Deborah, given the choice between watching coffee grow or watching middle-aged fat men lay face down in the water, opted for the beanery.

So we rented a car, dropped the womenfolk off at Greenwell Farms and backtracked up the coast in our rental car to Kahalu'u beach, located in the town of Kailua Kona, home of the hard "c".

The beach was very user-friendly and seemed designed for snorkelers like me who want to be in the real ocean, but don't want it to be too real.

There's the sandy part you see here, which is handy for those of us who need a soft spot to sit during the hour it takes to find our feet and struggle with the swim fins. But once you get out in the water, there's plenty of coral beds in shallow water to explore. There's also lots of colorful fish who've decided that tourists without spears are tolerable.

For a first-time snorkeler like me (well, first time in clear water), it was pretty cool to see all the fish wandering around beneath me. I decided I needed to take some pictures, so I ran back to get the camera out of the car. I didn't bother taking off my fins or mask, so I had to dodge a few spears and nets wielded by some overzealous Cousteau wannabes who thought The Black Lagoon had spit out a new Creature. But I made it back to the water and managed to snap one picture of the colorful undersea life....

.... after which my camera quit working. I called the Canon people later; they told me that not all cameras are designed for underwater operation, and that, lacking oxygen, cameras like mine will freeze up, experience hallucinations, and die in a matter of seconds.

So I gave up on pictures and started swimming around, taking in the scenery. Although the waters off of Kahalu'u beach are pretty sheltered from normal tides, the water still moves a little bit. Not enough to bother experienced snorkelers or most people over the age of 6, but enough to occasionally catch me unawares and push me into some of the shallower areas of the coral reef. By shallow, I mean anywhere where my diameter exceeded the water's depth.

You probably don't know this, but in spite of its beautiful appearance, coral can be pretty abrasive. With me, it was downright rude. Once my stomach started scraping its way along the coral bed, and little pieces of my flesh started floating past my facemask, I decided it was time to quit letting the water push me around, so I grabbed some nearby coral outcroppings to stop my movement. It was a bad idea; it turns out my hands were covered by the same flimsy stuff as my stomach.

Pretty soon, my section of the water was looking pretty festive as I added a few pints of bright red to the coral palette. I decided to get out of the water before I attracted sharks or, worse yet, gave the angel fish a taste for human blood.

Ken accompanied me back to the public restroom on the beach. Fortunately, no one else was in there, so I didn't gross anybody out while I used several rolls of toilet paper to dress my wounds.  I'm sure, though, that anybody visiting the facilities later didn't appreciate the lack of toilet paper, or that the place looked like Freddy Krueger's rec room.

On the way back to the car, Ken kept calling me "old chum." It took me until yesterday to get it.

After picking up the women, we stopped by a drug store. A few Band-Aids™ later, I was as good as new... which might make some of you think I'm exaggerating about the extent of my wounds. But I'm not... it's just that Band-Aids™ are vastly under-rated. They're the duct tape of the medical world, and I'd say that even if I weren't expecting a little something extra from Johnson & Johnson after they see this.

I took some pictures of my wounds to share with you, but decided not to post them. It would be too jarring to have the photo theme go from Rubes In Paradise to CSI: Hawaii.

The next day, we decided to go back to the Hilton Lagoon where supposedly I couldn't get into any trouble; and if I did, the water was murky enough to hide any hemorrhaging. Still, Ken wasn't content without pushing the envelope just a bit by venturing out of the lagoon proper.

To give you an idea of the terrain, I've taken the overhead shot of the resort used earlier, and carefully overlaid some state-of-the-art graphics:

The arrow is pointing at the resort lagoon. Snorkelers who are feeling adventurous or confused can make their way out of the lagoon, through a channel, under a bridge (circled on the map) and into an area that leads to open water (marked by the exclamation point). The passageway under the bridge actually has a rope strung across it.... you know, the kind with floats like what they use in a public pool to separate the shallow tiny-tot area from the rest of the pool. We asked the guy at the snorkel-rental shack if it was okay to swim underneath the rope and go on out to other inlet, and he said sure. I wasn't real confident with getting the okay from a guy whose other administrative duty was soaking masks in disinfectant, but it was good enough for Ken, so I followed him out into the lagoon, over to the bridge, under the rope barrier, and into the big kids' lagoon.

We felt pretty special. Apparently, not everybody gets the okay from the snorkel guy, because we were the only ones out there. At first, that made me a little apprehensive, but the coast guard never showed up and there were no irate locals or hotel employees jumping up and down on shore, so either it was okay to be there, or the Hilton was applying Darwinian theory to keep its guest list manageable.

The trouble was, there weren't that many fish out there, either. Perhaps they had all heard about the human sushi that had appeared the day before at Kahalu'u Beach, and had flocked over there in the hope of a repeat performance. At any rate, we looked around for a little while, then returned to the little lagoon. Back at the snorkel shack, we asked the guy if it was okay for us to snorkel in the koi pond near the resort's Japanese restaurant. He said sure. We started heading in that direction, but then we overheard him recommending lava surfing to another guest, so we decided to call it a day.

COMING NEXT: MORE SNORKELING!