jducoeur

No, this isn't about terrorism or anything of the sort. It's about scary activities, and ways to make them more or less scary.

Context: so, we're currently on vacation, and have been for a couple of weeks so far. It is a long, long, long-planned trip for my in-laws' 50th. The original theory was that they were going to go to Australia, and then we would meet them in Hawaii. That was supposed to happen last year; for obvious reasons, not so much. And Australia is still out of the question -- while there are hints of the borders opening, they're still not welcoming tourists. But we've been in Hawaii for the better part of two weeks now, and as of this morning we're on our own, having left the family group. So I have time to start writing, and a bunch of random posts will probably follow in the coming days.

(Yes, Hawaii. Yes, Hawaii is being super-strict about its covid protocols. That's why I haven't availed myself of any of the wonderful-looking SCA events that have started happening in the past couple of months, and why even our socializing fell to almost nil for several weeks: we wanted to make extra-sure that we were clean before traveling.)

But I digress...

We spent the past four days in the town of Hilo, on the eastern side of the Big Island of Hawaii. On two successive days, we did two adventurous excursions, and they're a fascinating compare and contrast. First, there was a tour through a couple of lava tubes that was far scarier than it really should have been; then there was a zipline tour that should have scared the living bejeezus out of acrophobic me, and yet wasn't that bad. And it all came down to professionalism.

The lava tube tour is basically spelunking -- the only difference is that you are going into a tube that was "dug" by fast-moving lava in a long-ago volcanic eruption. This is a common thing around here: the islands are volcanic, and the ground is basically Swiss cheese as a result. And the first half of the tour was fine -- the floor of the tube was fairly flat, the tunnel was wide, and aside from a few places where we needed to crouch it was plenty tall enough. We all had helmets, gloves and flashlights, so it was all fairly tame and pleasant.

But the second hour was the "adventure" tour, through a less-public tube. It started by all of us clambering down a 20-foot construction ladder into the entrance. (With all of our feet muddy from getting there, and no safety precautions whatsoever.) Then we get led by our guide down into a cavern piled pretty randomly with large, sharp, randomly-shaped and frequently unstable rocks. At once point we wound up walking very carefully along an 8-inch-wide ledge halfway up the cavern wall, ten feet above the rocks below. Up and down we went, trying to follow a guide who was traipsing well ahead of us, not paying much attention to how folks were doing and whether we were finding safe paths across the rocks. And mind, we had two 70-year-olds in the party.

We got out of it mostly intact: my mother in law got a nasty bruise on her leg, but nobody got seriously hurt. I have to attribute that in fair part to luck, though -- there were many occasions when somebody could easily have slipped and broken a leg or worse. I have no evidence that they had any plans or preparation for what to do if that happened.

And the hell of it is, it was almost exactly what I expected. Before we got there, the back of my brain was going, "If somebody says, 'Oh, you don't need masks here', that's a bad sign" -- and that was almost the first words out of the proprietor's mouth when we arrived: the only time I've heard that in all of Hawaii. The place was not just out of the way, they had lost power sometime in the past, so there were no lights, nor even working plumbing. It reeked of a complete lack of professionalism from start to finish, and the result was an experience that was a lot scarier, and less fun, than it should have been.

Then there was the zipline tour. Starting in some agricultural upland, this was a series of seven progressively-more-interesting lines. The first was the pure training-wheels line -- probably 50 yards, about eight feet off the ground, just to show you how the equipment works, how to get set up, how to launch yourself, how to land, and so on. From there, each line roughly doubled in length and interest, culminating in a line that was, no shit, half a mile long, something like a quarter mile over a ravine with a fast-rushing river and waterfalls.

Like I said, I'm acrophobic -- in principle, this was one of the scariest things I've ever done. But the tour operators were the exact opposite of the day before. Despite our two guides both being youngish and very casual and laid-back (indeed, she was giving him a constant stream of snark that reminded me of nothing so much as me and Aaron), they were both extremely precise and detail-oriented. When each participant got up on the "launchpad", the humor took a back seat to what looked to be a well-trained ten-point checklist, communicated by walkie-talkie between the sending and receiving ends before sending us on our way. When they were on the lines themselves they were just having fun (he was particularly fond of pulling various positions as he flew through the air), but on the ground it was all business. And the harnesses themselves were clearly well-designed, with no apparent single points of failure.

The result was that it was really less scary, and far more fun, than the lava tube, because the rational side of my brain could appreciate the sheer number of redundancies and checks that they had in place against someone getting hurt. We even chatted with them about "What if someone gets stuck in the middle?" -- which they casually admitted does happen (especially if you have a guest who is a little too light and a headwind). And they crawl out onto the line and fetch them. (She said that she actually finds that part rather fun, but it slows the tour down too much.) No denial that things could go wrong; instead, careful advance planning and training about how to react when it does.

The moral of the story isn't surprising: a well-designed and well-run activity is just plain more fun than a slipshod one. I'm sure that the lava tube operator would proudly brag that this was an "adventure" tour and you should expect danger from the name, but I really can't recommend it to anyone -- it was pointlessly risky, to no real benefit, and not well-described as such. Whereas the zipline was simply a blast: scary, but more exhilarating than terrifying...