The names of the authors of the infamous guidebook aren’t worth Googling, but their success selling books can’t be disputed. It’s based on one simple understanding:
Tourists don’t want to look like tourists.
It’s just not cool. Hence the authors’ “insider’s” guide to trampling private property, violating revered cultural sites, trashing local eateries and striking other poses to appear oh so hip.
Give me a break. Or, rather, give us a break.
For me, the opposite applies. Visits from Ma
Tourists don’t want to look like tourists.
It’s just not cool. Hence the authors’ “insider’s” guide to trampling private property, violating revered cultural sites, trashing local eateries and striking other poses to appear oh so hip.
Give me a break. Or, rather, give us a break.
For me, the opposite applies. Visits from Mainland guests are golden opportunities to act like tourists.
I love it.
When a pair of our oldest, dearest friends came for a visit last week, it gave my wife and me the excuse to go on a whale watch. And enjoy the view from the summit of Haleakala. And come to a stop in our busy lives to savor how sublime Baldwin Beach can be on a Saturday afternoon.
Our friends are named the Roosevelts. “That’s a name and a half,” said the young woman checking us onto the Pride of Maui for the sunset dinner cruise last Thursday.
It’s true that their family tree isn’t like everyone else’s – but everything else about them falls under the heading of perfectly normal. Our families have shared almost 30 years of raising kids the same ages, trying to make ends meet, moving to new homes and new jobs, all the while grappling with what Garrison Keillor calls “life’s persistent questions.”
But regardless of your name, or whatever other baggage you may bring on board a whale watch, the experience is an equal-opportunity humbler.
Almost everyone onboard is reduced to childlike glee by a brush with these majestic creatures. They set off pure joy by just cruising by.
Whale watches are something you never tire of, even after they start lending themselves to a Far Side perspective: From the whales’ point of view, they’re people watches.
I can just see a Gary Larson cartoon in which a couple of whales eye a nearby vessel.
“It’s easy to train that kind of animal to do tricks,” says one whale. “Watch me make them run from one side of the boat to the other.”
Joe Cano’s inimitable, Santana-flavored guitar provides perfect accompaniment for the orange sun as it hits a razor-sharp horizon under a turquoise and pink striped sky. A great dinner is part of the deal. (Call 242-0955 for reservations.)
But, as longtime denizens of whale watching know, it’s not about the Kodak moment. (That moment rarely happens anyway. The great photo you took with your mind of the tail disappearing dramatically into the sea turns out to be a little black smudge in a big blue background once the print is made.)
Instead, it’s about the contact.
We make up stories, superimposing our human notions and emotions about mothers and babies onto the wild creatures weighing tons, a few hundred yards off the rail. We anthropomorphize what the whales are all about – the birthing and the nurturing by the females, the macho rivalry among the males.
How accurate this version of them is doesn’t really matter. Maybe it’s just the opposite: maybe it’s them teaching us that we’re animals, too.
What matters is the encounter. The reminder of the planet we all share on paths that just happen to intersect for these few thrilling moments at sea.
We get another hit of the differences between residents and tourists when we try to give our guests instructions for their trip to Hana the next day. The tourists are the ones who know the names of the streets, the numbers of the roads.
Local folks rely on a more primitive form of communication: “You make one right turn at the Burger King ? you go three, maybe four lights to whasthenameofthastreet? you turn right, no, no, left ? you’ll figure it out.”
But the greatest tourist moment comes at the summit of Haleakala. The air is January crisp, the sky is electric blue, whisps of cloud dance playfully, leaving shadows on the moonscape.
The science domes are close by, tracking things, some made by humans, some not, across the sky. The domes are symbols of the future, here among shards of the past. This is the place the island was born, before there was such a thing as time.
Playing tourist is an excuse to look at the things we go by every day, and see them for the first time.
The authors of “Maui Revealed” don’t know it, but that’s as cool as it gets.
Contact Rick Chatenever at scene@mauinews.com.
