On Kauai, It's More Fun Wet Than Dry

"You've got to keep your okole down," he says, squatting like a baseball catcher with his rear end low and arms outstretched. "Otherwise you'll end up rolling up the car windows" -- he flails his fists frantically and pretends to fall backward -- "or nose-diving."

Soon we're ready to join dozens of would-be shredders, most of whom are in their mid-teens--half our age -- in the water. It's hard not to feel cool carrying a surfboard down the beach -- unless it's an idiot-proof beginner model, nine feet long and covered with foam rubber for safety. On the plus side, they're stable when floating and therefore easy to sit on while waiting for a wave. They're a step up from the original wooden Hawaiian surfboards, which were 12 feet long and weighed 100 pounds.

The tricky part is knowing when to start paddling like crazy: ideally as the wave crests exactly where you're floating, says Ganzer, standing in chest-high water as we bob.

"Paddle, paddle, paddle!" he yells, as he gives each of our boards a shove at the critical moment, like a father teaching a child to ride a bike. Sometimes five students catch the same foot-high wave, but somehow we each find ourselves standing upright, alone, riding toward shore.

Since a beginner board is as hard to steer as a battleship, each short ride usually ends up on the beach or in knee-high water, where we slowly topple. But the thrill lingers.

So does the sting of salt water in the eyes and the feeling of full-body exhaustion at the end of the afternoon.

"Surfing is 95 percent paddling," Ganzer had warned us, and an hour of surfing feels like an hour of push-ups. That night, we fall asleep at 9 p.m. and sleep for almost 12 hours.

A Grand Canyon

Photographers call the hour before sunset, when colors glow with extra vibrancy, the "golden hour." Kauai, the oldest island in the main Hawaiian group, looks like this all the time, like someone nudged up the saturation on a celestial version of Photoshop.

The best place to appreciate this quality is Waimea Canyon, carved by the river of the same name across the western half of the island. Kauai is 33 miles wide by 25 miles long, and most of its interior is rugged mountains. This concentrates the island's urbanized areas -- only 3 percent of the total -- on the coast.

Waimea is only one of the island's winding canyons, which radiate from its center like bicycle spokes after an accident, but it is by far the most impressive. Mark Twain called the 3,600 foot-deep gorge the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific," and the eroded reddish layers do resemble the Arizona landmark. Dusted with greenery, it looks covered in moss from a distance.

The 18-mile road up the canyon's western edge leads to numerous overlooks, and the colors blaze even under cloudy skies. From the Kalalau Lookout near the end of the road, you can see the impossible tropical turquoise of the Pacific meet the knife-edge mountains of the Na Pali Coast, 3,000 feet below.

The two-mile Honopu Trail leads along one of these ridges. It's tough, steep going through tropical scrub, with many logs to hop and thorny ferns to snag your clothes. But the views of the coastal mountains from the end are astounding, despite the sightseeing helicopters that buzz overhead every 15 minutes. In between, the only sounds are the rustle of the breeze and the rubber-squeak twitter of tropic birds soaring on updrafts.