Goodbyes are awfully hard to say ... when what you're leaving is alot of sun, sand and surf.

When planning trips to palm-fronded destinations, veteran travelers usually budget an extra week or two of psychological lag time to accommodate the inescapable effects of island hangover. Any decent vacation is normally followed by a brief hanging-on period. Travelers cling to feelings, sights, smells, sounds - to anything that maintains a connection to their carefree, vacationing selves for as long as possible.

But tropical locales, particularly Hawaii and the Caribbean demand more of the returning visitor. Tropical moods are visceral. They linger far longer than mountain or big city moods. And it's almost impossible to avoid giving in to them following an extended stay in the islands.

Fond memories of out-of-the-ordinary experiences are great things and a big part of why we travel. But once back on the mainland, why is it so hard to shake the sand from our shoes? Surely you have seen these recent island interlopers. Possibly you have been one yourself and fallen prey to the rhythm of the waves even when planted firmly back on the continental mass.

The loud Hawaiian shirts and neon surf shorts don't really go with the gray sidewalks of your home town, but you keep them in your wardrobe rotation for a couple of wash cycles anyway.

Words like "brah" or "mon" don't exactly roll naturally off the tongue, but you simply can't help yourself from peppering your speech with funky island idioms that would make you feel like an idiot most of the rest of the year.

Clocks? well, yes, you acknowledge that they do exist and may fill some practical need, but, in the heady days home from the tropics, their world is still not yours, not at least untill one more layer of tan fades away, the saltwater residue is finally scrubbed from your hair, and the constant reverberation of steel drums or slack-key guitars drifts away from the CD player in your mind.

So why all the embarrassing self-indulgences from the recently returned sun worshiper?

Why the attitude that, even back in the real world, continues to scream, "This whole planet is one big Trader Vic's and I'm on the Mai Tai Express to Pina Colodaville"?

Ever since the crews of the H.M.S. Dolphin first discovered Tahiti and its seductive pleasures in 1767, the lure of the southern islands has been the exotic possibilities and mysterious ceremonies said to await the Westerner daring enough to venture there.

Deserted islands, volcanos, witch doctors, locals clad (or not) in bright, flowered fabrics ... this is the stuff fantasies have been made of for more than two centuries. And while today many of those possibilities have pretty much disappeared (or at least have been replaced), collective social mythologies rarely dry up quite so quickly.

North Americans' traveling roots were laid down in large part by restless Europeans - a people with many splendid qualities, but a people who also felt felt the strange need to invent polar-bear swim clubs and who traditionally lacked decent tans, drinks made from fermented sugar cane, and music that didn't start with some fogy saying, "A-one, and a-two ..." In such a context, the prevailing lure of the islands seems pretty obvious.

But there is something more out there that continually challenged visitors catch. Landlocked bodies act something like giant air filters in the tropics, pulling invisible, feel-all-right particles out of the trade winds and storing them in the pores where they remain for weeks at a time. And no amount of mainland squeeze can draw them out before they are ready to die.

Which, sadly, they must eventually do. The shirt with the giant hibiscus on it again looks fashionably out of place. The Rastafarian lifestyle, which once seemed so right for you, now looks a little incongruent with your fast track career goals. And where the heck did that Cecilio and Kapono CD go, anyway?

Then comes the wrenching day far into the future when you suddenly find yourself at one of those theme parties, where cheap versions of the real thing - fake palm trees, canned juice, plastic renditions of bamboo cups - have been assembled in a trying-too-hard attempt to re-create the genuine goods. Blue drinks glow like nuclear waste. A dork with a fresh tan says, "no problem, mon" and the lack of authenticity in his voice makes you cringe.

But someone has had the good sense to keep Bob Marley on the stereo, and after a while you settle in. You drift off by yourself to a corner of the yard, you listen for the sound of a faraway breaker. And that is when you know the hangover has passed, and it is time to go back for more.

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Kokomo