How to be a tourist [Maui]

This past Thanksgiving, I decided to celebrate my close proximity to that Hawaii (the one many of you still - mistakenly - think I inhabit) by spending the holiday weekend on Maui. When I'm a tourist, I always try to play 'tourist' and put some ironic distance between myself and my pat cliche vacation activities. That's why, when I booked my plane tickets and the deal-finder website offered me tickets to some lu'au, I found the idea hilarious. What better way to acknowledge the sham that is the Thanksgiving holiday than to attend a show full of greedy white folks shoving food in their face and watching 'the natives' dance? I considered it an anthropological expedition.

To the tourist, Maui is like every movie, poster and postcard representation of Hawaii. It's gorgeous and soothing. There are the palm trees, there are the white, white beaches, there's all that green lounging comfortably on the hills' mild curves, with Haleakala behind them like a raised eyebrow. Over on the west side of the island are some cliffs, if you'd like a slightly more dramatic vista; they look quite luxurious in the late afternoon sun. Maui is a great place for a holiday; the island's landscape is a soporific.

Perhaps this is the explanation for the zombie-like hordes attending the Royal Lahaina Luau on Ka'anapali Beach. When I arrived at the Royal Lahaina Resort I found myself toward the back of a very long line of people droning away and taking photos next to every palm tree and orchid - 700 people long, to be precise. I certainly wasn't expecting an intimate evening with the firedancers, but I also wasn't prepared for a night of assembly-line spectacle. Once inside the seating area, made up of long tables covered in tarp, the night's possibilities grew more discouraging; anyone who's eaten in a cafeteria knows what food prepared for 700 tastes like, but can you imagine Mai Tais for 700? After picking over my plate and downing three nameless blue beverages in quick succession, the entertainment began. The people around me went back for third and fourth helpings while nudging each other, laughing and whistling at the men and women performing onstage. Our host was a gorgeous, charismatic woman who sang, taught the children a hula, and introduced each of the 'Polynesian' performances. She did all of it with such charming contempt that halfway through the show, I was thoroughly convinced of my own smug arrogance. Drop the quotation marks, I was a tourist, and the worst kind. I left early.

The next day I woke up in the dark and headed back in the same direction for a morning snorkel at the Molokini Marine Preserve with the Pacific Whale Foundation. Out on the water, I watched Maui's western coast curve itself around me as we set off for this tiny island reserve. Several other tour operations had boats there as well, and while I always enjoy the thrill of swimming in the open ocean, and still experience that ripple of shock as the first bright colors dart below me, I couldn't shake my uneasiness from the previous night's event, and was somehow reminded of it every time a poor swimmer using various floatation devices bumped into me. What are our obligations, as visitors, to our destinations? Should we learn the culture's stories, respect them enough to expect more than a smorgasbord of coconut bras and ukuleles? Hell, should we even learn to swim? Is it really any better to take a tour with a non-profit such as the Pacific Whale Foundation, which conducts research and activist campaigns for marine life?

I was jarred out of my sense of familiarity, my notion of almost-belonging that the past year in Hilo has given me. Even as a resident, I encounter so many people who move to Hawaii for escape, for some utopian ideal, for a drastic attempt at a 'fresh start'. And there we are, at the root of my discomfort; in all of these people I encounter that part of myself.

As the morning wore on, our boat left the others and went closer to Maui's southern coast and anchored by a lava outcropping. There were maybe 30 of us in the water now, instead of 200. Paddling around, I turned my head and found a sea turtle not three feet away, swimming up to the surface for air. I looked around and soon found five more, coasting up or down, settling onto the ocean floor, elegantly tilting their fins just slightly to change direction; and I was reminded, then, of the poem 'Listen' by W.S. Merwin, who happens to live on Maui.

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster and faster then the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is