The Hawaiian Island of Oahu

Nearly every event in Hawaii has dancers and not just hula girls, but big, muscular men shakin’ their Polynesian booties. The best place to watch all this is at the Polynesian Culture Center on the north coast of Oahu. I think all the male dancers are from Brigham Young University-Hawaii football team. Dark and well-built, moving fast with fire; they’re as hot as the flames they throw. The young women are pretty too.

The Polynesian Culture Center is an amusement park without rides. Each of seven Polynesian Islands, Samoa, Old Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand and Marquesas, has its own area with a small museum and arena where Polynesians tell stories and share their histories.

Another attraction along the north shore is Waimea Valley and Adventure Park, like a big rainforest with animals and lush vegetation. Here we see a little gray and brown goose called a nene, we watch brave men dive off cliffs and we play croquet in the rain with a couple we meet from New Jersey.

In the center of Oahu is Dole Plantation where Mark and I stop on our return to Waikiki Beach on the southeastern coast. From the gift shop I buy a sun-catcher, Maui Potato Chips and a fresh-cut pineapple—like nothing Mark and I have ever experienced before.

A bite into a nearly glowing yellow piece of fruit—like sunshine—is like breaking a dam to a sweet, cool river of juice. It overflows my mouth and drips off my chin. After our first bites, Mark and I look at each other with grins and wide eyes. Unbelievable. We’re in the Garden of Eden. We’ve reached nirvana. This pineapple is it; we are experiencing the ultimate, the apex of our taste adventures.

Between us, we eat the whole pineapple in the front yard of the gift shop, surrounded by the peeling trees, each layer of bark revealing a different shade of orange, green, yellow, brown.

After eating our pineapple, we go out to see the mother-land, the pineapple plants that delivered the delicate treat we just delighted in. For $4.50 apiece we can enter the big hedge-maze, but mazes scare me, so instead we watch the carp in the pond. They are so plentiful it looks like there’s no water, just fish slipping along on other fish.

Though we don’t want to mar our remembrance of the pineapple, we are hungry by the time we get back to Honolulu so stop at Hard Rock Café for a bite before the show. We are staying at the Beachcomber, where the running performance is Magic of Polynesia with John Hirokawa. The show is wonderful with young male and female dancers besides the magic. All these dancers are as good looking as the first we saw.

The next day we visit Bishop Museum and Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu. Charles Reed Bishop founded Bishop Museum in 1889 to honor his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last of the royal Kamehameha family. The museum contains royal family heirlooms and Hawaiian and Polynesian artifacts.We learn poi is made from taro root; the nene, the goose we saw at Waimea Valley, is Hawaii’s state bird; the Polynesians discovered Hawaii by navigating the Pacific Ocean in canoes using the stars; strychnine is not a concoction of chemicals but is a tree native to Hawaii.

Another tree common to Hawaii is the lipstick tree. It grows in different colors. I bend a leaf from a tree and apply the stuff. It’s orange—not my shade, but rubbing it off completely proves impossible. I wish I’d chosen a pink hue.

Mark drives us east to Sandy Beach, just up the coast from Hanauma Bay. I heard that Hanauma Bay has the best snorkeling, but snorkeling in December—even in Hawaii—is too cold for a native Buckeye, and Mark doesn’t swim.

Big waves crash close to shore at Sandy Beach. We watch the local surfers and any other nut who dares a wade.Two men with bikini trunks and no surfboards, obvious foreigners, venture out into the ocean but keep getting knocked down by waves. One man gets up repeatedly, only to be knocked down again—in mid-calf-high water. While he is making his way in, a lifeguard runs out to help this man’s friend, who is having a hard time. The water is really powerful. When the lifeguard gets to him, two local surfers are already on either side. By the time they get him to shore, he looks exhausted. The sea is rough, yet the two surfers run back out to catch the next wave. Locals, obviously.

I guess surfing is its own form of dancing, probably started by the Polynesians. Surfers or fire twirlers, I’ll watch any of them dance in Hawaii.