At the Jolee House AirBNB, we had the best of the four rooms, with not just our own private bathroom, but our own private lanai (for some reason they insist on using a different word for “balcony/porch” here). We had a view of the water from the lanai, but that meant it also had a view of the late afternoon sun, making it usable only during breakfast, or after dark. Though inside the room wasn’t ideal either, with the window A/C unit struggling to combat the heat beating on the uninsulated roof. At Bob & Paloma’s outside Hilo, open windows and an occasional ceiling fan were enough to keep things comfortable, but it’s a different story on the western side of the island where the volcanoes block the trade winds.

The first night we were lucky to have no one else staying, so the shared kitchen was exclusively ours too. And then for the next several nights we shared the space with Juliet (originally from Switzerland) and Dani (not sure), two really cool young women who were somehow adept at socializing with old people like us (“oh yeah, my dad is a huge fan of Michael Jordan”, says basketball-scholarshipped Juliet when we talk hoops). Maybe it’s because they were college students, but it was the closest to the feeling of living with roommates that I’ve had since college. Living separate lives, but meeting each morning or evening to discuss adventures, or life in general, is a nice social middle-ground. And the late-night laundromat run they let us join them on in their rental car really drove home that college-roommate feeling.

A nice part of Kona’s heavy level of tourism was that our AirBNB provided an assortment of snorkeling gear for the guests to borrow. So we grabbed masks and fins, and I took a kid-sized boogie-board for the extra flotation that a wetsuit would normally provide me. We rode a few miles south to Kahalu’u Beach Park, and with Rett’s colorful swimsuit-covering pareo flapping in the breeze as she pedaled, and the boogie-board strapped to the side of my bike, we admired our own super cool Hawaiianness.

With the bikes we didn’t need to pay to park, and as we entered the water we got a free shot of mask-defogger from a volunteer, so at no cost and under our own human power, we found ourselves swimming along with green sea turtles! And over moray eels hiding in coral, and a wide assortment of brightly-colored fish. We’ve been pretty lucky to do high-quality snorkeling over the last couple years, but the self-powered ease-of-access here was a new and satisfying layer.

The next day we tried another area, riding north back to the heart of Kona, and dipping our faces and selves into the waters off Kailua Pier, right near the Ironman swim area. As expected, the quality and density of sea-creatures wasn’t nearly as high here as it had been at Kahalu’u, but the lack of crowds and lack of coral on the sea-floor made exploration a lot easier (I’d also traded my boogie-board for an inflatable vest, which turned out to be the ideal flotation-aid). Ali’i Drive had also been converted from a vehicle conductor to a street festival for King Kamehameha Days, so amongst other wanderings and window shopping, we got to check “see hula dancers” off our Hawaii card.

It was nearly sunset when we headed out for our third snorkeling event in three days, this time riding six miles north to Honokohau Harbor. We were giving up our independence and getting on a tour-company’s boat for this world-unique experience: night-swimming with manta rays! Rett’s idea, she’d found an operator who would take us and just one other family of four out on their low-slung “school bus” of a boat, tearing off further north to an area near the airport.

Just after the sun slunk below the ocean’s edge to the west, we tumbled our wet-suited bodies into the water and all (along with our guide) grabbed onto the edge of a long surfboard-like rectangle (or, like a spinal backboard that paramedics use) floating in the water. The underside of the board projected light downward into the much-deeper depths here. We all assumed the “Superman” position, arms extended grasping the rail on the edge of the board, feet pointing outward, and faces looking straight down to the sea-floor some 30 to 40 feet below us.

At least, we attempted to do so. The 7-year-old with us had whined through the whole boat ride about being scared to get in the water, but at least it wasn’t just for attention; his change-of-heart never came and he stayed on the boat. His mom probably should have done the same, as she panicked almost immediately after getting in the water, and quickly rejoined her son on dry “land”. And his dad, while not panicked, was completely unable to assume the “Superman” position, with his legs instead continually curling forward under the board. To his tremendous credit, after only a minute or two of attempting to correct himself, he also decided to bail out. He’d paid $600 for himself and his family to have this experience, so I could imagine many other men who would have lacked the selflessness to tap out, and instead tried to fight through it while disrupting the experience for the rest of us.

So that left just me, Rett, our guide, and their 12-year-old son (who thankfully was on the swim team) to revel together in one of the most incredible wildlife encounters we’ve ever had.

Within seconds of returning our eyes underwater, we could see a manta emerge from the murk far below us, and begin to slowly beat his massive “wings” as he powered up directly toward us. In between the two wings, his planar diamond form was distorted by his gaping mouth, literally cavernous enough to fit most of that 7-year-old on the boat inside. As he neared, the ever-increasing detail we could see in his body felt like a virtual-reality simulation, where bringing an object closer to your face causes the processor to re-render it with all-new information again and again. At the last second before blowing us out of the water, he redirected the steam-locomotive momentum he had accumulated, and gracefully arced backwards, his belly skimming the board held between us four humans, and his wingtips nearly touching our feet. If we didn’t need to hold onto our snorkels, our mouths all would have been nearly as agape as his.

He continued to do these back-somersaults, perfectly aligned with the axis of the board, and peaking right at our faces. Despite his incredible size (a reminder that stingrays, which might be 14 inches wide, are not manta rays, which can be 14 feet wide!), he had near-magical body-control and awareness. Despite our bodies drooping at various angles into the water as our feet sank below the surface, and despite his large side-facing eyes coming within literal inches of our faces, and his wingtips flapping even closer than that to our feet, he never actually touched us. The many mantas who came to do the same dance under our board over the next hour all possessed that same mystical skill.

When multiple mantas would be attracted to us simultaneously (and supposedly, to the plankton that our board’s lights attracted), they exhibited the same skill amongst themselves. It was like watching four dancers twirling within a hairsbreadth of each other (but never touching), in a way that only incredibly-detailed choreography and practice could make appear feel random and endlessly-flowing. The way they moved through 3-dimensional space showed that James Cameron must have done this tour before he created the giant sea-creatures in Avatar 2.

With their intricate red gills (Rett’s weeklong rental of a prescription dive mask really paid off in this environment where the fish unusually swim toward you), unique spot patterns (by which scuba divers below us identify individuals every night), and evolving choreography, their swim-bys were endlessly fascinating. For a period we had linked up with the boards of other tour groups (there might have been nearly 100 humans in the water this night), but by the grand finale, we were some of the only people left in the water sharing this intimate experience from an alien world.

It was impossible to disguise our exhilaration when we returned to the boat, but luckily the 3/4ths of the family who “missed out” either hid their jealousy well, or genuinely enjoyed watching from the boat nearly as much as we had in the water (and honestly, it would have been pretty awesome to have that out-of-body experience to get a zoomed-out view of the mantas interacting with us).

Rett found the experience comparable with kissing a gray whale in Baja, and despite being three times the price, even my frugality agreed that it was well worth it. By coincidence, the girls from our AirBNB had booked a tour with a different company for the same night, though only paid to view from the boat. But when we returned to do our end-of-night dorm-room catch-up, we learned that they luckily had let themselves be convinced to pay a bit more on the boat to upgrade to the full in-water experience. While some of the individual manta rays here old enough to have been dancing with humans here for 40 years, for us it was a once-in-a-lifetime.