It's 1000 Pounds of Manta

Hawaii: Sunday

There aren't very many, if any, pictures of Sunday because most of what we did wasn't photo friendly, so you will have to enjoy the stories alone. Like old school, before the digital cameras.

The day starts for me at 7:00am with some relaxation in the sauna at the Spa Without Walls. Then, at 8:00am, I start a two hour massage journey in said spa. Let me explain further. I am taken to a private wicker hut with wide open windows. In through the windows, the early morning sunlight and ocean breeze creep in. Below my massage table, there is glass in the fllor so that I can watch the running waterfall water trickling down to the ocean. Dahn, my masseuse, was actually trained in India and is amazing. For two hours, he rubs down every part of my body, including twenty straight minutes on my feet. AND he gives me a facial with the lovely and amazingly scented Tara products. I walk out of there feeling like a person totally separate from the person I walked in as. And it's only 10:00am. I kid you not - when Dahn did pressure point therapy on my face, I actually left my body for a while. I suggest you do this at any price if you're in the area. The boys may disagree, but they did not have Dahn. Though they did seem to love their massages (though Pookie was battling a ripped up knee and shamus a bad sunburn during the massage, which may have impacted their opinion).

Then after I get out of the spa but before the boys get into the spa, shamus and I go swimming in the ocean. Just him and me and the ocean. And it was a big day for him, because he's not so much of a swimmer, but he did an awesome job. After shamus went up to shower, I swam out past the end of the lagoon into the main ocean and let the waves carry me along for a long time.

We all met up for kobe burgers and tropical drinks for lunch and talked about the future and the Polynesian people and migration and colonization. And lunch, of course, was also by the ocean. Because that is how you do it in Hawaii.

When the boys headed off to spa, I spent the afternoon back in the ocean and on the beach. Still somewhat out of my own body. I crave that feeling back already.

So, that night, we had planned to go night snorkeling and swim with the manta rays. Here's the only bummer of the day. When he was snorkeling in the morning, Pookie opened up a big gash on his knee and he was in major pain, so he had to bail on the manta ray snorkeling. So sad. Halff, shamus and I considered not going so we could stay with him, but we ended up going. And that was the right call.

Things seem a little sketchy at first. The boat crew is cool, and the sunset going down as we take the boat ride out is brilliant, but when we get there, there are A LOT of people. In the end, that doesn't matter.

So, yes. Firstly, don't make the same mistake I did. I confused a stingray, which is about 40 pounts and three feet wide, with a manta ray. A manta ray is 1000 pounds and ten feet across by maybe five feet tall. Here's how this works. Manta rays feed on plankton. Plankton feeds wherever it sees light. So the boats go to the zone where the manta rays live (there are something like 70 or 80 of them on the Hawaii coast - all photographed and named) and drop lights down to the bottom of the ocean floor. Then, after the sun goes down, the snorkelers hit the water, all with lights in hand to attract more plankton. As an added bonus, there was a guy shooting underwater video, and his lights were super bright and attracted a ton of plankton. The thousand pound manta rays go to the plankton, and they feed on it by doing giant backflips in the water. When they do these backflips, they do them right under you and as they reach the top of their flip they're literally not more than an inch, if that, from you. The first time a thousand pound sea creature comes an inch from you, you freak out a little bit. But then you really look at them, and you see how beautiful they are. They're like dancers in the water doing these huge, circular backflips below you, sometimes deep down and sometimes right beside you.

At first, the sheer number of people out there snorkeling in the pitch black is disconcerting. You're getting kicked in the head and elbowed a lot. And people have kids out there, which I think should be a no-no because the kids tend to freak out AND it makes it hard for the adults to control their bodies in the water because they're handling their kids, too. But the good news is that it's dark, and the water is choppy, and so most people don't last out there more than fifteen or twenty minutes. So if you can just wait it out and handle the choppy water and the dark for a while, you can get to a point where there aren't that many people out there, and that's when you can absolutely appreciate the thousand pound manta rays. There were either two or three of them in the water with us (nobody is totally sure). They just backflip and feed and I've never been that graceful in my life, and I have 13 years of dance training. It sounds corny, but there's something lifechanging about being that close to something that powerful in the middle of its most basic act - feeding - and it's more beautiful and so many of the things you've seen in your life.

Have you burned out on my talking about Hawaii being beautiful and pefect yet?

And this is how the trip ends. We order room service and eat dinner on the balcony in mine and Pookie's room. Ocean night. Just the four of us. Laughing about how shamus needed to stand by his action from earlier, how Pookie is baffled by the workings of a resort, how I look totally fat in this one picture shamus took, how Halff refuses to let me say I'm fat. It seems inconsequential, but I wouldn't have ended this any other way. Mahaho, Hawaii.

I'm tearing writing this, and really, there are two entries left!