Destination: Hawaii : Composing a Little Water Music on Oahu

“There’s one thing you gotta learn when you’re in Hawaii,” says retired local, Cory Crooks of Oahu, as he shakes his hand with an upright thumb and pinkie, giving us the well-known Hawaiian high sign. “You have to know how to hang loose.”

We’ve just capped off the first week of a two-month family backpacking adventure through the Hawaiian Islands with a swim and a snorkel in the world-famous Hanauma Bay Beach Park, about a half-hour bus ride from Waikiki.

We can hear our son, Henri, 7, letting out excited gasps through his snorkel as he encounters schools of rudderfish and striped mullet.

The bay teems with more than 150 varieties of tropical fish that don’t mind rubbing gills with delighted tourists.

“They have the aloha spirit,” explains Crooks, a volunteer educator with the Friends of Hanauma Bay group. “But really, they’re conditioned to come in because the tourists feed them.”

Everyone gets a look at the fish. They jump up and out of the water in front of our non-snorkelers, Matilda, 5, and Presley, 1.

“They are beautiful,” says Matilda, pretending she’s Ariel, the Little Mermaid.

The public bus ride to Hanauma Bay is the farthest we’ve traveled from our Waikiki hotel since we arrived here to get our island legs at the start of this journey.

The 5 1/2-hour plane ride from LAX was easier than we could have imagined.

Matilda and Presley conked out half an hour into the flight. Henri introduced himself to a Hawaiian businessman seated next to him, and the pair spent the whole time trying to turn rolled-up pages of paper into headsets for the in-flight movie.

It’s the scent of Hawaii that we notice from the first moment we step off the airplane. The aroma of the plumeria flowers causes a rush like Adrenalin. We’re really here!

A shower of light, misty rain falls as we leave the Honolulu terminal in a ’79 Chevy Caprice taxi. The driver had been waiting four hours for our $23 fare--a slow day for business.

“I like living here cause this is where all the action is,” he says, driving past nightclubs, showrooms and marinas.

The action for this family is at the beach, three blocks from our hotel, the Aston Coral Reef on Kuhio Avenue. Booked through our travel agent at $45 a night, it was the cheapest accommodation we could find.

Coated in sun block, we venture onto Kuhio Beach Park, on the east end of the Waikiki strip. It’s like walking into a postcard.

Yellow catamarans and orange outrigger canoes glide along the aquamarine sea. Bronzed surfers on long boards ride the hip-high waves 200 yards offshore.

Our children, or the keikis , as the Hawaiians call them, have happily immersed themselves in this pretty picture.

Thousands of others, from just about everywhere, lounge about in the tepid sea as if in an enormous bathtub. There are all types here--from G-strings to geriatrics.

Weaving through the crowds, in and out of the water, are prospectors with metal detectors looking for lost valuables.

We sit in the shallows watching the kids, looking at the blue sky, pinching ourselves. No phone calls, no faxes, no appointments and no Barney the dinosaur.

But even dreamy days by the sea can have drawbacks. “There’s always sand in my tushie,” Matilda tells us.

“Can’t you guys play nice?” we plead, after Presley tries to demolish one of Henri’s sandcastles.

Instead of hitting the beach one morning, we hop a complimentary bus to the Kodak Hula Show--a Waikiki institution held every Tuesday and Thursday at the Waikiki Shell.

It’s an enthusiastic, colorful and free introduction to Polynesian culture. The focus of the 50-year-old show is to get shutterbugs to go through plenty of film. There’s a photo op at every sway of the hip and beat of the drum.

In the late afternoon the trade winds sweep across the busy sidewalk of the main drag, Kalakaua Avenue. Music is in the air, drifting from the beachside bars of the large resorts.

The attire for sunset in Waikiki is T-shirts, shorts and shades of sunburn--from grapefruit pink to ketchup red. Ouch!

From our hotel room we’ve been researching the best deals for the next stages of our journey, using coupon books given to us on the street and in local newspapers. We pick up permits for three weeks of free camping on three islands at the State Parks and Recreation offices in downtown Honolulu.

Through a local travel agency, Cheap Tickets Inc., we purchase 20 inter-island air tickets for $45.95 each--$27 cheaper than the full fare. We purchase three weeks of car rental for about $320. Cha-ching!

Fortunately for our bank account, the things we love to do have no price tag--swimming, building sandcastles and making new friends.

We arrive early at Hanauma Bay--a prerequisite for getting in. There, under arching palm trees, Cory Crooks tells us how the people of Hawaii are preserving the bay by limiting tourists and by restricting bread and other human snacks from the fish diet. Special fish food is for sale at the beach.

Without warning, Crooks gives us all a big bearhug. “This is how we say goodby in Hawaii,” he says.

He puts a handful of home-grown litchi nuts into our backpacks for the journey ahead and waves “aloha” as we hike a steep track back to the bus stop above.