Am I the last Canuck to discover the joys of Hawaii?  Sure seemed like it after I announced plans to spend a couple of weeks in Maui. 

Hardly had the H-word crossed my lips when I was inundated with tips from fellow citizens who, as far as I knew, had never ventured beyond the bright lights of Brampton.

“Oh yeah – Maui.  Make sure you spend a day on the beach at Ka’anapali. Don’t miss ‘Ulupalakua or Ke’anae Wailua. And remember to drive up Haleakala to check out a sunrise.”

Check them out? I couldn’t pronounce them. I wasn’t entirely positive how to say “Maui.”

Well, now I’ve seen a morsel of Hawaii -- the outer crust of the former Sandwich Islands as it were -- and I’m a believer.

If Walt Disney with his corral of artists was around to conjure up a Cinemascopic version of earthly Eden he’d probably come up with something close to Hawaii.

For Frostbacks shivering through yet another Canadian winter the islands have special resonance.  Mangos on the trees … Mynahs on the balcony … friendly natives who speak English better than you do -- all in December?

It’s almost pornographic.

And there are wonders the average Canadian simply doesn’t have the mental equipment to absorb on first contact. The Banyan tree in the centre of the town of La Haina – a tree with multiple trunks and a canopy that covers as much terrain as Toronto’s city hall. The sight of molten lava and snowdrifts.  Both dripping down the same mountainside. 

Or beholding those strange eruptions out on the ocean. Great geysers of water shooting into the air. What’s that about -- underwater volcanoes? Incoming meteors? U.S. Navy War Games?

Nope. Humpbacks. Whales as big as city buses and as homely as warty, waterlogged turnips. Blue-grey behemoths with ungainly pectoral fins protruding improbably like windmill blades from both sides of their heads, each fin a third of the beast’s body length. Elfin-eyed and fulsomely be-barnacled, rocketing out of the water like gigantic, vulcanized Halloween creatures – breaching, flipper-slapping and generally acting like bumptious teenage boys on a testosterone overload.

Which in a sense they are. It’s the male humpbacks who put on the show to wow the cows (and to cow other bulls). 

Each winter humpbacks come by the thousands, quite literally from the ends of the earth (they spend the rest of the year feeding in the frigid but food-rich waters of the northern and southern oceans) – to make little humpbacks off Hawaii.

They are awesome, in the pre-Paris Hilton sense of the word – and quite undaunted by the presence of human voyeurs. 

Mighty generous of them, considering we humans did our level best to wipe them out. 

Whalers slaughtered over a quarter of a million humpbacks in the first half of the last century alone. By the time a moratorium was adopted in 1966 there were only a few thousand left in the world.

But they bounced back. And they bounce irrepressibly about the Hawaiian waters today, vaulting and crashing, thrusting their jaws, waving their flukes, occasionally flipping a two-storey pectoral into the sky in what looks like a giant “finger” to onlookers.

It is impossible to feel anything less than elation, watching humpbacks. Tourists spontaneously cheer and applaud and weep with joy. You can’t help yourself. 

“Most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales” Melville said of them in Moby Dick. 

Feeling depressed? Go watch the humpbacks. You’ll throw away your Prozac.

But these are big fellas. And they’re horny.  Any danger to onlookers? Nah.  Humpbacks are 50-ton couch pillows as far as humans are concerned. They couldn’t bite you if they wanted to – no teeth. They suck in their food – krill and tiny fish – through baleen -- boney plates in their jaws.  Even though it’s the size of a subway car, the humpback prefers the salad bar. 

Why, it probably wouldn’t even try to eat a humuhumunukunukupua’a.

Who he? The state fish of Hawaii. Lives in reefs, looks like a Picasso painting with fins and is all of about eight inches from nose to tail. The name is longer than the fish.

Hawaiian Islands? Should be called the Surprisin’ Islands.

Arthur Black is a syndicated humour columnist.