Geeks embrace Hawaii's ways and wonders

In Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, the Byodo-In Temple is a scale replica of a 900-year-old Buddhist shrine in Kyoto, Japan. (LOUISA KASDON FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

OAHU, Hawaii - It doesn't take long for a group of geeks to go Hawaiian. We arrive from all corners of the earth, with laptop bags on our shoulders and cellphones on our belts. Twenty-four hours of balmy breezes, a few mai tais, and we've all gone native. One day here and the Polo shirts are banished in favor of Hawaiian prints.

Geeks are not a golf-playing, working-on-the-perfect-tan kind of group. We're on the go from sunrise tai chi classes on Waikiki Beach to stargazing over the craters at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We're hiking under waterfalls in the rain forest, kayaking to an island preserve, riding in a helicopter over an active lava plume, and chanting in Hawaiian at a Kahiko hula class.

We visit botanical gardens, Buddhist temples, and all the museums in Hawaii from the tiny Lanai Culture and Heritage Center to the planetarium and anthropology exhibits at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, where we also see the oddly English-style Iolani Royal Palace, the only palace on US soil. Wherever we go, we stay for the optional slide shows.

You get sort of used to hanging out with geeks, even if you aren't naturally one. (I am probably the only person with an MIT degree who can't operate my TiVo or hot-wire a battery.) This group meets at scientific and engineering conventions several times a year. Our Hawaii moment was courtesy of a conference on nuclear radiation and standoff detection (it's a growth industry). The techies deliver papers with lots of data on esoteric subjects. And then we party . . . in a geeky sort of way.

In two weeks, we visit three islands: Oahu, the Big Island of Hawaii, and Lanai, a sleepy, out-of-the-way retreat, with endless waves and the historical remnants of both the earliest Hawaiians and the hundreds of thousands of Asian immigrants who came here to work the pineapple plantations.

Geeks are masters of curiosity. Rarely content with a guide's answers, we need more. We want to know, for example, the exact location of the hot spot on the Pacific Tectonic Plate and what species of ginger are indigenous to the islands. We cannot simply go on the Pearl Harbor tour, we want to read the telegraph chatter between FDR and the admirals, and we want to know whether it's true that the last queen of Hawaii "died of a broken heart" as our guide tells us. We look up in the night sky and wonder which stars the Polynesians used to steer the outriggers that brought them from Tahiti to Hawaii.

Our first morning on Oahu, after a breakfast of macadamia and pineapple pancakes, Chinese omelets stuffed with pork and Spam, and the ubiquitous and inexplicable side order of macaroni, we review our agenda. Highlights include the Halona blowhole, the Hoomaluhia Botanical Garden, and a Buddhist temple. Bernie, our driver, has all the way-points plugged into his Garmin GPS.

The blowhole is whooshing water 100 feet into the air. We calculate the pressure required to shoot water that high. Luckily for us, at the gardens there's an abundance of botanical history. We learn that no plants were on the islands when they were born. We hug quite a few trees, rattle a dried monkey pod, and scratch the bark of the allspice tree.

Next is the Byodo-In Temple, a replica of a 900-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. The huge red pagoda is spectacularly sited among 2,000-foot cliffs, with curving footbridges and a stream stocked with fat orange koi. Visitors are invited to clang the seven-ton brass temple bell and the surrounding cliffs ensure a constant soft, sonorous hum. (We calculate that, too, since one of us is a specialist in acoustics.)

On our way back to Waikiki, we buy heaps of Hawaiian shirts for everyone back home, change into our own, and go to a Benihana, a place we'd never consider back home but feels so right here.

Later in the week, 20 of us sign up for a kayaking excursion to see shore birds and green sea turtles in the protected reef of Kailua Bay. It's a stormy day, with wind, warm rain, and 10-foot sea swells. The novice paddlers are panicky, especially the ones who don't speak English. Like ducklings in 10-foot two-person kayaks, we follow our solitary naturalist to the tiny island. The Pacific is frothing; there's a serious undertow and whipping wind; and we all are in terror of being snared by the coral reef. The 10-year-old Greek girl is crying; the Israeli engineer is having chest pains. An hour later, as we make landing, I get scraped against the reef trying to rescue another kayaker who is caught in the undertow. Back at the hotel, it's a three mai tai evening, telling battle stories.

The ensuing days are more serene: visits to museums, a walk in the rain forest, a tour of Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona, lunch and shopping in Chinatown. We squeeze in beach time and several exquisite fish dinners. At the Iolani Palace, we slide along polished wood floors, remembering not to touch the velvet on the drapes, or the gold leaf on the state banquet table. When we finish the tour, it's time for the Royal Hawaiian Band's weekly free noontime concert in the adjacent park.

The band was established in 1836 by King Kamehameha III and is one of the last links to Hawaii's monarchy. The final number is "Aloha 'Oe" ("Farewell to Thee"), written by Queen Lili'uokalani, the last royal to hold office before the United States annexed Hawaii, in 1898. We've just seen the palace room where she was held in house arrest for years, the quilt she embroidered while in custody, and the newspapers she read. By the end of the song, we are in tears.

The Big Island holds a huge attraction for us: Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Here we consider the huge undersea hot spots, the prehistoric bursts of molten rock from the earth's core that bubbled up to create these islands. The most irresistible aspect: Kilauea's volcanic eruptions continue daily, and any day you show up, you can hike through lava tubes, camp at the lip of the crater, or helicopter to places where red-hot molten veins of lava still claim their turf. In the park the signs invite you to feel the heat, smell the sulfur. Jim Kauahikaua, the scientist in charge, says he experiences on average 100-plus measurable earthquakes a year and fairly constant volcanic eruptions. He says to be patient: "Come back in just 250,000 years. You'll see the birth of a new Hawaiian island, Lo'i'hi. It's rising from the ocean at the rate of 6 to 8 centimeters a year."

Right now, Kilauea is obliging with a big show for visitors (if not for the homeowners whose subdivision it is incinerating. A large, new lava vein has escaped the park's confines. County and civil defense workers have created a walking path for visitors to watch the molten lava meet the sea.

We become obsessed - staying next to the park in Volcano Village Inn, going to the evening slide show on past eruptions, hunting for eruptions with our binoculars. And we take a two-hour helicopter ride with Blue Hawaii. Our pilot, an Air Force vet, hovers the craft above an active flow. Suddenly it hits us that we have been on an active or spent volcano every minute of our visit to Hawaii.

After almost two weeks of intense touring, we are ready for Lanai, the one-stoplight island consisting of two hotels and a guesthouse, three cafes, one movie theater, and a tiny historical and cultural center. For us it's an intellectual wind-down: walks, dips in the ocean, more mai tais, and, before flying back to the mainland, enough time to finish reading James Michener's "Hawaii."

Louisa Kasdon, a freelance writer in Cambridge, can be reached at louisa@louisakasdon.com.