I am nearing completion on the installment of Marika I mentioned, but I thought I’d say a few words to let the world know I’m back from my trip. I’ve collected a suntan (particularly dark in a few spots on my back where the Bullfrog decided to hop off), lost a mobile phone (curse you, water!) and gathered up some incredible memories.

After some initial nervousness and floundering — you never realize how being an asthmatic allergy-ball all your life gives you a complex about your breathing until you need to learn to breathe a new way or risk breathing really salty disgusting water — I fell in love with snorkeling, like every other member of my immediate family. Okay, perhaps I don’t have it quite so badly as my dad. I wouldn’t get up EARLY to see different fish, and if I saw one of those fins zizzing around, you couldn’t get me in the water if you promised me a sailboat, a pony, and a book deal.

Okay, okay, maybe the book deal would work.

At any rate, snorkeling is frabjus. It’s quick, easy little space-walks into an alien world, one with its own architecture of coral and lava rock, peopled with brightly flashing fish and visited by slow, majestic turtles.

I’m having a devil of a time finding copyright-free pictures of the fishies I saw, and my own inexpert disposable-camera pictures won’t be back for some time (and, of course, some of the interesting fish deliberately waited for the last exposure to reveal themselves.) I saw lots of yellow tangs, reef trigger fishes (also known as humuhumunukunukuapua’a!), and orangespine unicornfishes; I spotted something that looked a lot like a ‘moorish idol’, several delicate threadfin butterfly fishes, bright neon bullethead parrotfishes…and dozens of other kinds upon which my memory and my searches of galleries of beautiful, copyrighted fish images have not yet cooperated. I saw plump sea cucumbers, a flounder settling on the dust and quivering into invisibility…and a four foot-long zebra moray eel, sinuously lurking along the bottom of a rock wall. It was very much worth the sea water in my nose, mouth and throat, the long ritual of the Bullfrog application, and, in one case, the long drive with three miles of one-lane, two-direction road.

I really didn’t spend the entire time snorkeling, I promise. I also saw red peeking out from scars on the surface of an inactive crater on Kilauea — I’ve no doubt they glow at nighttime. I lay at the edge of great black cliffs only a few years old, and watched the play of surf building and expanding a jet-black beach.

Hawai’i is beautiful, if peskily expensive and hard to get around (I think Ryan would have ranted Yosemite Sam-style even if the rental car hadn’t been the saddest little hunk of plastic ever to pretend to vehicledom.) It smells nice, even…and there are things you don’t expect. One of our first nights there, we encountered a small, slender tabby cat — immature, you might guess, but there was assurance in her poise and finished grace in her proportions, and I guessed that perhaps cats, as well as people, used to be smaller, and all the half-wild cats in Hawai’i (if people bring Persians and Russian Blues, they are likely spayed or neutered!) are likely descended from ships’ cats…a guess later borne out by a lovely little marmalade, an ocelot-marked tabby strutting by a patio of diners, and any number of little ones having a very lazy, amicable parliament in the parking lot of one hotel. These are the things I love about travel; the unexpected, the beauty that steals on you unawares, the constant play of curiosity, admiration, speculation and wonder. If we are the sum of our experiences, I have built some new wings onto myself, and I am still wandering about enjoying the novelty…and the view.

Here are a few pictures I took with Ryan’s extra, semi-busted digital camera: