To Sea Life Park

Turtle exhibit at Sea Life Park

About every four or five years I head Diamond Head (east) along the H-1 freeway to Sea Life Park, Hawaii’s small-scale version of Sea World. I first visited Sea Life Park on a school field trip back in the sixties. The cost then, if memory serves, was $2. Now the price of entry is $26 for adults, $13 for kids under 13 and adult “kamaaina’s” (residents of Hawaii). For those who compulsively perform financial calculations, that’s a 5% compound annual growth rate in the child ticket price over a 40-year period.

Unlike California aquatic parks such as Sea World, Marine World, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, it is easy to take in all of Sea Life Park in an afternoon. When we went last week, I carefully clipped a 25%-off coupon from the back of a relative’s Hawaiian Telephone directory, thereby saving $22.75 on four tickets. At the net admissions cost of $68.25, Sea Life Park was a fair value.

Note to myself: I really must get a State ID card to capture the often-huge discounts available to Hawaii residents at hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions. On my last trip three years ago I took the first step by waiting patiently for three hours to get a certified copy of my birth certificate, whose “Territory of Hawaii” designation betrayed me as a geezer, but I forgot to bring my original social security card from California.

Applicants are also required to supply “supplementary documents” such as marriage licenses, but I don’t see how the authorities can enforce this rule. How would they know that the documents exist? Many women do not change their surname when they are married; neither do they use the “Mrs.” prefix, preferring “Ms.” (or these days even “Dr.” and “Rev.”).

We turned on the air-conditioning to its maximum setting as we approached Hawaii Kai in our rented Pontiac. Hawaii Kai is now a prosperous community of million-dollar homes, but I remember when it was a dry, hot expanse of dirt roads, bushes, and tangled foliage, home to pigs and chickens.

The “pig man” would come to our home in central Honolulu and pick up a week’s supply of our table scraps, which had been ripening in a three-foot steel can, and take it to his hogs. He would show his gratitude by inviting us to an annual luau at his farm. The food was plentiful and tasty, but the powerful stench emanating from the pens and the large horseflies buzzing about the dishes weren’t esthetically pleasing. Then again an eight-year-old didn’t know what "esthetics" meant or that they were supposed to matter.

For hours I would watch the hogs, who rolled around in a nameless mixture of mud, slop, and waste material. The new residents of Hawaii Kai roll around in BMW and Lexus SUVs and would be horrified to have the pig man as their neighbor. I hope he sold his land at a good price to Henry J. Kaiser, the visionary industrialist who developed the area.

Past Hawaii Kai the highway narrows to a single lane in each direction. We poked along at 35-40 mph behind sightseeing tourists, past rocky cliffs and golf courses, and entered the parking lot twenty minutes later.

The shows and exhibits may be more lavish on the Mainland, but the setting at Sea Life Park, with the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, is unmatched.

The Park is nestled against the cliffs of Makapuu.

After each show we headed back to the store as respite from the heat. The sweat on the back of my hand erased my re-entry stamp twice during the afternoon, but my pallor and flat, accentless English, not to mention the befuddled expression that I have learned to evince without much effort, proclaimed that I was another confused tourist. My son bought a towel to take back to college in San Diego, and we headed back to town for dinner with my cousin. © 2004 Stephen Yuen


Rabbit Island is the backdrop for the dolphin show.