Do Something Dirty

That’s the tag line for Kauai ATV Tours. It’s smart marketing. Not because anyone is going to go off-roading in the hopes of, you know, getting a little nooky (although about eight or nine people in my group were part of two large families of Mormons who, frankly, had a little bit too much Big Love going on during our excursion). No, what makes “Do Something Dirty” smart is that it lets you know right up front that you will, in fact, get dirty. Very dirty. So dirty that you’re warned before you even hop on a 4-wheeler that you shouldn’t wear any of your own clothes (okay, maybe underwear).

And that’s just your clothes. Which is why they give everyone goggles and sell orange bandanas for two bucks each to cover your nose and mouth (yes, I bought one and I was glad I did). As for the clothes, they hand those out at the staging area across from the old abandoned Koloa sugar mill. They toss you camouflage pants (basically one-size-fits-all and then you get a piece of rope to hold them up) and color-coded t-shirts (so most of the Mormons wore azure blue).

And it’s a good thing they do because once you get out on the trails, it’d be hard to recognize your own sister (and I’d say from some of the hanky-panky going on with the Mormon families, they definitely had trouble recognizing their own sisters).

I was on what they call a 4-hour “waterfall tour,” although it seemed like half that time was taken up just getting our Army gear on and listening to the long-winded orientation telling us all the things we couldn’t do (do not get out of line, do not go past the lead guide, do not go on your own, do not stray from the middle of the road, do not go in vegetation, etc., etc., ad nauseum). I know, right, liability.

Still, when our Hawaiian guide told us not to ram into the ATV in front of us, I had to wonder, Who the hell would do that? They must get some weird birds on this tour.

Originally, I was scheduled to take out my own ATV but there was a scheduling mix-up or something and they were short vehicles so I ended up in a mud bug with Kristi who is very nice but very gullible (after she suited up and was messing around with her goggles, I grabbed a wavy stick off the ground and cupped it in my hand in front of her, asking her if she liked snakes, and she screamed so loud I think the tour guides thought I’d assaulted her).

Maybe that’s why they gave us the only mud bug that was “eco-friendly.” Which means it ran on old French fry oil and smelled like the drive-thru lane at McDonald’s.

I’m a bit of a control freak. So there was no way I was going to let Kristi drive our Super-Size-Me mud bug. But I didn’t know how to diplomatically broach the subject with her. So I just got in the driver’s seat before she could and said, “I’m driving.”

“Thank god,” she said. Evidently she wanted nothing to do with piloting our French fry mud bug which, actually, was sort of was like a souped-up golf cart. Anyway, after what seemed forever, we pulled out of the staging area and drove slowly in a big circle, sort of like Indians surrounding the covered wagons, just so the guides could make sure we knew the difference between the gas (or, in our case, cooking oil) and brake pedals. Which most of us did. (Okay, I don’t know what the deal was with the two young Japanese girls; maybe the brake pedal looks different in their country. Still, they did very little damage, considering.) After the Japanese girls got new rides, it was off down the dusty red road and into the jungle.

To be continued tomorrow…