DAY 13 - Getting clean

With cow poo being a constant occupational hazard here, we’d been running out of clean clothes to wear, so today was laundry day. Judy drove us into Hilo to use the Laundromat, and guess who we immediately ran into there? Joy and Henry! We’d arranged with Joy to take us to the Volcano National Park on Monday so we discussed that entire plan again while she folded all her underwear into neat little piles. After we’d figured out how to use the machines and safely put our laundry in, Joy and Henry invited us to come with them and have lunch in some Mexican fast-food place, where I had a nice tofu taco and Henry somehow ate the largest meal I’ve ever seen grace a restaurant plate, even in America. They went to see a movie after that but we didn’t really feel like that so we went back to the laundry place to wait for Judy there.

Unfortunately, the view from the place we were sitting at was possibly the least picturesque part of Hilo so I only picked out these few elements in the distance to draw.

Through some misunderstanding, Jai Dev (whom we have taken to calling simply ‘the spouse’) was suddenly also in Hilo so we got a ride back with him while Judy got some more groceries. During the drive he lectured us about the incredible amazingness of milk and got offended slightly when I said I didn’t believe that humans could fast without food OR water for several months, and took this as a reason for (even after we got home) coming into the kitchen several times during the evening and giving us more facts and snippets about these kinds of diet. At some point he appeared with a jar of white liquid asking whether we wanted to try any ‘sour milk’, allegedly some ('amazing!') by-product of making cottage cheese, but which tasted plain and simply like actual sour milk. (I was the only one polite enough to accept some, and boy did I regret it) During the evening, Kyle and Sarah had somehow been inspired to try their hand at drawing by creating portraits of each other (or more accurately, of their alter egos, Kyle Obama and great-auntie Sarah) the results of which can be seen here:

I'm so proud of you guys.

DAY 12 - Hippie Shakespeare

Since it’s the Thanksgiving weekend, Judy’s children were home today and so our main task for today was to do a tie-dying project with her 9-year old daughter Kali, despite the fact that today was the first day since we've been here that it actually rained. It took us a while to figure out how to mix the dye properly and took even longer to boil the huge amounts of water required on our little stove, which tested Kali’s patience quite severely. The tie-dying itself went pretty smoothly and we dyed what felt like a billion garments that Judy kept chucking out of the window at us so we could use up all the dye. Seems like all of Kali's relatives will be receiving tie-dyed socks for Christmas.

They did come out a bit better than what it looks like here.

Towards the evening Sarah suddenly became very ill and had to take some time out, but soon enough she was back out in the kitchen wearing an Indian headdress she’d found in our room and drinking green tea like a true fighter.

Indianer kennen keinen Schmerz.

Sarah, Kyle and I spent the evening with the possibly biggest waste of time ever, taking about two hours to put together our respective ‘The List’s of five celebrities we would be allowed to sleep with even if we were in a relationship. (The others were not impressed with my choices.) After Kyle went to bed, Sarah (possibly inspired by all the list-making) started counting up all the bad luck she’d had since getting here (bed bugs, got water in her ipod, got electrocuted, got sick etc..) coming up to 13 items while we could only think of three bad things for me, all of them being menial stuff like having a mosquito bite on my face. So she’s pretty convinced that she's been cursed, we need to keep an eye out for her :)

DAY 11 - Thanksgiving!

Despite this being our very first Thanksgiving, our vegetarian and more spiritually inclined host family really wasn’t very concerned with celebrations in any way and so we had to look elsewhere for something to do. We briefly considered going to a Hare Krishna vegetarian feast ceremony of some sort that Judy recommended, but Kyle advised us against that and invited us to go to his favourite bar in Keeau instead where there would also be free food. So after only about half an hours work, we walked towards the street and started hitchhiking. Even though it seemed a bit more hopeless with three people, after not too much time we got picked up by an old couple in the most amazing car ever with two long benches in the open back, decorated entirely in red and yellow and with a little horse statue on the front hood.

It was a very windy but thoroughly enjoyable ride.

The bar turned out to be a little dingy room filled with old locals watching the American football game, drinking, eating and chatting, and something about the entire atmosphere made me feel like I was in a movie.

The two people on the right came over after a while having noticed that I was drawing them and Deborah was so kind as to write everybody's names on them and the lovely little message in the corner.

We stayed there for pretty much the entire day, the best thing being when complete strangers came up to us, gave us a hug and a smile and introduced themselves, such as the extremely lovely Sue and Chuck or indeed Deborah and Bob from the picture above. We played a bit of pool (which I once again lost for my team, both times) but eventually decided to go home, which proved to be harder than expected again. We’d arranged with two people Kyle knew there to bring us back but they somehow lost their keys, and the search was not being made easier by the very high and/or drunk elderly woman not getting into it at all and instead rambling on about how much she hated the French (‘fucking obnoxious! Never go there!’) and her turtle-faced son getting increasingly annoyed with her. They finally drove off with someone else to get their spare keys from home and we had to resort to good old hitchhiking, also made substantially more difficult by it being dark already, us being three people including a guy, and said guy not being able to stand still in the corner like we told him to and fooling around constantly, not impressing anyone with his terrible British accent (we love ya Kyle :)). Finally a guy stopped who recognized us from yesterday and dropped us right by our house again and on top of it gave us a free banana pie, which was again pretty sweet ending to the day.

DAY 10 - Crazy times at Uncle Robert's

Ever since hearing about it we planned to go to ‘Uncle Robert’s’ on Wednesday, which was described to us as a little bar/live music/food venue, so that was the plan for the evening. The day was spent with the usual chores, Sarah got insanely bitten again by a mysterious insect (and then told that it must be because of her bad karma) and I, after doing copious amounts of washing up for Judy, was assigned to make a ‘For Sale’ sign for their truck which was quite a welcome task. Finally we were done and headed out to hitchhike to the place, which took some time again but we were picked up by a Czech guy covered in sawdust who dropped us about halfway and then by a young German guy called Marco also going to the event. Uncle Roberts turned out to be a big place with several bars and food stands, a stage and dance floor and a big market area with people selling jewellery, tie-dyed T-shirts, aromatherapy oils and the like.

To our slight surprise, the average age of the crowd there was quite high and the amount of old men with mad beards was crazy.

I gave up drawing them after a while, there were just too many.

 After discovering the bar’s lack of cider, we went over to a small corner shop and bought some and then just sat around enjoying the music for a while.

More old men with beards.

We got talking to various people, one of them an old man (with a beard) selling aromatherapy who sprayed both of us in the face with a spray-bottle labelled ‘LOVE’, a guy called either Tony or Toby and a corpulent Hawaiian surfer called Skye who turned out to be quite a main character in the evenings events. The dance floor was populated for a long time only by this woman:

But after it got a bit busier we joined everyone dancing for a while. Shortly after that point a very tall lanky guy with some sort of cloth over his head approached me and began rambling about the deep connection he felt with me and other kinds of spiritual mumblings. By this point we were up for going home and luckily Skye (who’d promised us a ride back) was to be found close-by. I was talking to him for a bit when Sarah was suddenly on a mat on the floor being taught meditation by the spiritual guy (whose name was ‘Satori’ or something) who seemed to feel a deeper connection with her now. It took a while to get everyone going but finally we were in Skye’s car (Satori included), thinking we were on the way home. How wrong we were. After asking whether we’d mind ‘a little detour’ we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of the desert at a little hut and Skye setting up a camp fire. We spent a good long while there getting creeped out by our respective guys, but finally Skye agreed to ACTUALLY take us home. Wrong again. After driving over the bumpy roads like an absolute madman and dropping off Satori at his place he suddeny pulled into a gate that was definitely not ours, and, sure enough, turned out to be his own. Despite him trying his best to appear hospitable and impress us with his ‘sound system’ and guest bedroom, we were quite determined to go home now and after a long time of persuasion, he FINALLY agreed and at last we got home safe, quite hysterically laughing at or evening and finally being able to fall asleep in our own beds.

DAY 9 - ...aaand more work

Today was another day spent alternately working on the usual tasks and hanging out in the kitchen with Kyle.

I tried drawing Kyle as well but his bald little head kept coming out looking like Gollum's  so I decided it was better for everyone if he was erased.

 I also went to cut grass for the cow with him  for the first time which was quite fun despite emerging from the other side rather scratched up. Not much else of importance happened so for lack of good subjects to draw around my little place in the kitchen I transcribed this lil’ poem on the back of the ‘Coconut Macadamia Herbal Tea’ box which I though was quite funny:

Nice to see that Hawaiians also care about tea.

DAY 8 - Work Work Work

Because of a miscalculation of our remaining work hours we realised today that this was our last day of the week to complete our 25 hours (as opposed to Tuesday) and therefore spent the entire day working hard. I took a break from sketching and spent my lunch hour reading 'Way of the Peaceful Warrior', a book that Kyle lent me. Hopefully I'll be back with more drawing soon!

DAY 7 - Mermaids and mosquitoes

Today since we had a date for the beach at 1, we only had to do a bit of work in the morning - Sarah doing the ol’ cow-related stuff and me being given my first ‘creative’ job, touching up the window and door frames of the main house with white paint. Our ‘crew’, as Kyle called them, arrived about half an hour earlier than we anticipated but we got ready quickly and were soon on the highway to the ‘warm ponds’, going through a beautiful green tunnel of jungle. The warm pond turned out to be a pretty large rocky basin right by the sea in which the water was body-temperature with millions of little fish swimming around our feet.

Unlike Sarah I didn't become a mermaid underwater.

Sarah, David and I stayed in the pool for ages, floating and paddling around or just sitting on the rocks in the shallow water and daydreaming. Just before we were about to get out and join Joy and Henry for a picnic, Sarah spotted Sky and Ocean from yesterday, swimming around nearby with their dad and his friend who was introduced as ‘Uncle Doug’('Uncle', as he explained, is what Hawaiians call any respected older males from the generation above theirs). Little Sky was being incredibly adorable (especially when doing her party trick of blowing bubbles into the water while with a really serious expression turning on the spot) and we played around with her and Uncle Doug for a while until we finally had to leave the pool. We had an amazing picnic with Joy and the guys, the highlight for me being cold rice with avocado and cream cheese wrapped in a big hibiscus leaf, but there were also papayas, bananas, rambutans and popcorn. After we packed up we drove further to the farm the guys were working on because they apparently weren’t having a great time and wanted to leave. The best thing about that ride was when Sarah put on ‘You make me feel like a natural woman’ on her speakers and David, with his rough husky voice, sang enthusiastically along with it.

This was another song that was sung in the car, perhaps more appropriate to the general atmosphere.

At the farm, which was in the middle of a beautiful jungle landscape, the guys went in to talk to their host while we waited in the car and were positively eaten alive by mosquitoes to the point of covering all our bare skin with anything we could find and pulling our T-Shirts up to our noses, which still of course didn’t stop the little bastards from stinging me smack bang in the middle of my forehead. It was decided at some point that the boys would stay at their farm for another day and leave the following morning, so we drove off into the dusk with Joy who brought us back to Judy’s whilst entertaining us with interesting conversations in her insane accent.

Pictured: What it's like for three minutes whenever Joy starts laughing (which is often)

DAY 6 - Hilo baby!

We were given a lift into Hilo today from Jai Dev bringing his 15-year old son Nicolai to a soccer game, the entire ride spent with him alternating between furiously mumbling mantras under his breath or giving his son soccer advice. Arrived in Hilo, we first went to check out the recommended ‘Farmers Market’. The first booth we saw belonged to an old artist selling prints and T-shirts and doing portraiture, so after we got talking to him he convinced Sarah to have her picture drawn while I took the opportunity to draw him.

We bumbled around the market for a bit, seeing various more or less nice and more or less cheesy Hawaiian souvenirs, clothes, jewellery and food, and then went to explore more of the town, which was accomplished pretty quickly due to its small size. We had lunch in a lovely Middle-Eastern café and then decided to go towards the seafront. On the way there we came across the same two guys from yesterday performing and went over to say hello to one of their wives, who seemed very excited to talk to anyone and told us her entire life story (barely audible to me through the thumping bass of her husband’s band) while we ate the lilikois we’d been given by the Middle-Eastern-Café woman. The band-wife recommended seeing the ‘Rainbow Falls’, so we made that our next port of call and headed out towards the highway to hitchhike. It was a lot harder today, whether it be because of the proximity to the city or the time of the day, but finally a woman picked us up and dropped us at the Rainbow Falls, a beautiful waterfall to be looked at from a platform in the jungle.

Unfortunately, no rainbows today.

We could see some teenagers climbing about on the rocks above the waterfall making motions to jump, but when none of them did and the wind became quite strong and cold we decided to leave and seek shelter in a café across the street. The guy serving was an incredibly lovely New Yorker named Chris who made me a chai tea, gave us biscuits and oranges for free and talked to us for a long time about things to do here and what he recommended, all while two adorable Hawaiian children named ‘Ocean’ and ‘Sky’ were running about the shop. Chris had arranged with their father, Ian, to give us a lift back to Hilo so while waiting for him to be ready we sat outside reading the classifieds in the newspapers we’d been given and enjoying the tea and cookies.

Back in Hilo Sarah insisted on getting a drink, and despite both of us having forgotten our ID at home we got some cocktails in the ‘Pineapple Bar’. The next bar we went to wasn’t so lenient, so we decided to go home and headed towards the big street on the seafront. On the way there Sarah spontaneously tapped some people in front of us on the shoulder to ask for the way, and they happened to be driving out to where Judy’s farm was anyways so they offered us a lift. Their group consisted of an older but very young-spirited woman called Mardy or Joy with the most insane accent and two young worktraders she'd picked up hitchhiking, a quiet Canadian called Henry and a lanky culy-haired Californian called David who had a strange husky voice from an accident some time back and who, upon hearing that I am German, immediately recited the 'Erlkönig' to me. Joy drove us all the way back to our home and offered to pick us up tomorrow to coming swimming with them in the famed 'warm ponds' which of course was an offer we gladly took.

DAY 5 - Trip to Pahoa

Today it was a beautiful sunny day, meaning that our morning consisted of having to heave Sarah’s ant/flea/bedbug-infested mattress onto the roof of a car to be dried out by the sun and then washing the three dogs. Shakti, the oldest of the three, didn’t seem too bothered while the young one, Subaja, made it substantially more difficult and us more wet. Finally the Chihuahua ‘Shankhar’ (‘whom we do not speak of. Ever’ – Sarah) was easy to control but none to pleasant to touch with his sausage-like physique. Then we shovelled up the fresh cow dung to be delivered to the greenhouse and Sarah got to plant some lilikois (meaning putting them on the earth and covering them in cow poo) while I did the obligatory half-hour-cuddle session with little Diwali. We planned to go into another nearby town - Pahoa - today, so after only two hours we got ready and headed out towards the highway. With the bus not coming very often and hitchhiking apparently being very safe and common here, we had picked that as our transport of choice and were indeed soon invited into an old Asian man’s car, who offered us bananas and drove us to so-called Pahoa, which turned out to be a big parking lot with some supermarkets, fast food joints and little shops dotted around it. There we met this awesome dude riding around the place on his bike selling eggs, with a small Christmas tree in the basket and a funny fluffy white chicken sitting on top of it.

According to the tirade of chicken facts he let loose once he stopped and got talking, these kinds of chickens are called silkies and they're a very friendly breed with black bones and five toes.

We got some supplies in the supermarket but were a bit lost afterwards about what to do, since we suspected that this couldn’t be all that Pahoa had to offer. After speaking to a waitress in a nearby ‘café’ we hitched another ride to ACTUAL Pahoa, which turned out to be a small and slightly decrepit but absolutely charming town.

A bit like the Wild West, Sarah and I decided, except with more cars.

We spoke to some slightly drunk women in a boutique about where to go out around here, got some incredibly Hawaiian postcards and spent some time in a little second-hand book store, amazed again and again at the unconditional friendliness of the Hawaiian people. Sarah then got some pizza next to where some old men were performing old rock ‘n’ roll songs under the watchful eyes of their wives.

You can't really see it here but the best thing about them was
 the left guys' black and white checkered socks with sandals.

Since the sun was setting already we hitchhiked again back home, where we spent the evening as usual hanging out in our tropical kitchen with some newly-bought tea.

DAY 4 - Cow times

Sarah woke up completely covered in mysterious red bites today, making me quite gleeful that in the fight for the proper bed I’d gotten the short end of the stick and slept on the futon. Our first assignment for today was of the not-so-exciting variety: cleaning out the cow barn. This consisted of collecting all the old, dried up grass from the area and wheel-barrowing it all the way down beyond the greenhouse, then shovelling the surprisingly large amount of cowpats onto the wheelbarrow to sprinkle it around the greenhouse later and filling up the cows' water trough with the help of a too-short hose and a bucket. Sufficiently covered in cow-poo already we didn’t mind the baby-sitting of the baby cow this much today, and even though it took us a while to work up the courage to snatch her away from under its mother’s eyes, we were successful eventually.

Even though the big cow's name is 'Surabi', she's never referred to as anything else but 'Momma'.

Unfortunately, baby Diwali had just been given a bath by her mother and was covered in a fine layer of slime, but she was a lot more relaxed today than it was yesterday and even laid down next to us.

What a little darling, once she's calmed down.

The only time Sarah actually held the cow - finally I had my hands free for sketching

DAY 3 - SO many new fruits

For breakfast today we had something called sweet rice, a dish that Jai Dev very excitedly recommended but that elicited only mild reactions from us – it’s boiled grains of some sort served in raw cows milk, so quite porridge-like but a lot more liquid and sour-tasting. We had a bunch of fruits for dessert that seemed quite alien to me at first but turned out to be familiar fruits in very exotic masquerade, such as big yellow passion fruits that looked quite different to the shrivelly brown ones I’m used to, or mad spiky red things, discovered to be just lychees with a very fancy exterior.

Plate I: Pretty manageable.

This was by far not the last fruit-related surprise of the day. We spent the morning cleaning the kitchen and defrosting the fridge and then were introduced to the greenhouse to water and weed the kale and strawberry plants growing there.

The greenhouse doesn't look too green here...

While working on that, Jai Dev came by and invited us to see a few more of the fruit trees on the other side of the house, and allowed us to pick two varieties, one being a strange squishy yellow potato shape with dots on it and the other a surprisingly heavy spiky orange affair. We put them away to be eaten later when Judy asked us to spend some time with the baby cow to get it used to people – not a job I think either of us was expecting from this trip! Trying to lure it away from its stary-eyed mother turned out to be quite an intimidating experience, but with Judy’s help we finally had the calf under control and I spent a lovely half hour sitting in and around cow poo trying to calm the little thing down by stroking and hugging it, getting intense amounts of cow-slobber on myself. After that (and a much-needed shower) I went to eat one of the fruits from earlier (the 'noni'), while Sarah wouldn’t go within a six foot radius of it because of its alleged smell of feet. I had most of it, and while it was largely disgusting and made my mouth and lips numb, it was still an interesting experience.

Plate II: WHOAH

DAY 2 - Our first actual day

Not quite being able to escape the jet lag we woke up very early today, looking in wonderment out our window at the landscape we’d only seen in black & white the previous night, thousands of shades of green unfurling now dotted with yellow flowers everywhere.

These are the farm dogs we'd already seen yesterday but had not been at all able to remember their complicated Hindu names (which I'm sure I've also severely misspelled here)

Venturing outside we met Jai Dev and the mysterious ‘other helper’, who turned out to be a young bald guy from Ohio called Kyle with a wide smile and an infectious laugh. They were just in the process of leading the two cows to their designated grazing spot, quite a spectacle made better only by the five-day-old calf 'Diwali' hopping about in the most adorable of fashions. We were also introduced to the goats and shown our shared outdoor-kitchen, where we had breakfast and asked Kyle the millions of questions we had about everyone and everything on this farm.

 

Transcribed directly from the whiteboard in the kitchen...
I just think these few sentences sum up perfectly what this place is like

Shortly after that, our main host Judy arrived, a small competent woman with a long plait and swirling skirts, who gave us another little tour of the place as well as some tangerines. Our work for the day consisted only of cleaning the floors, windows and bathroom of our own room which was completed soon and shortly after, Judy took us into the nearest town so we could buy some emerging necessities for our time here like insect repellent and flip-flops (which are called ‘slippers’ here, by the way). We got everything we needed in a Walmart (which was exactly like in the stories – gigantic and, well, American) and then had a little Chinese meal in a place called 'Panda Express' or something, after a rather tedious ordering process in which unfamiliar accents were quite a barrier both for us and the poor little Chinese lady trying to serve us. We were to take the bus back and so waited for a while at the bus stop:

This old Hawaiian guy got up for us to take his seat and sat on the ground despite (or because of?) his back pains he loudly complained about

The bus ride itself ended in hilarity when Sarah after continuous reminding that we were looking for street 23 pulled the stop-string at street 25, but we found the house without problems once we’d gotten off. Pretty good first day!

Our kitchen! An oven! In the middle of nature!

DAY 1 - A very very long 18th of November

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t extremely nervous before embarking on this journey. Leaving at the coach station in the middle of the night after a small last-minute packing disaster and saying goodbye to the most important person in my life left me puffy-eyed and sick with anticipation as the coach drove along the silent streets towards Heathrow Airport. I had arranged with Sarah to meet her there at 6:30, but due to the heavy traffic around the airport she and her stepdad didn’t actually make it until about two hours later. Troubles with her phone signal made it impossible for her to inform me of that state of affairs so I sat around getting increasingly worried for a while. To distract myself and to physically stop my eyelids from closing I decided to very quickly sketch the faces of other stressed and sleep-deprived travellers rushing about at this hour of the morning while hoping everytime I glanced up from my sketchbook to see Sarah’s face among them.

None of them was her.

She did of course arrive soon after and the journey could begin. Not much needs to be said about the flight to LA, we slept, talked, laughed a lot, watched the first fifteen minutes of a bunch of movies, laid around in the aisle for a while when our legs were getting too cramped and discussed again and again what possibly could await us. Stopping in LA for a few hours allowed us to communicate with our families, already many hours ahead of us, and enjoy some very overpriced chicken wraps.

I love planes as much as anyone else but 27 hours travelling time is pushing it.

The plane to Hilo was a lot smaller and even more cramped, which luckily didn’t bother me too much since I fell asleep pretty much immediately and woke up only shortly before landing, much unlike Sarah who did not have a good time. Hilo airport was small and rustic with a refreshing complete lack of airport security and passport controls, and after collecting our baggage we quickly found our host Jai Dev, a friendly but extremely American man with a shaved head and bright yellow T-shirt. Driving back to their farm through the humid air we had a chance to ask him about our host family a bit more and their attitudes and ways of living, and after the anticipated immediate mentions of spiritual energy on the island and chakra points I’m sure this will be an interesting time at the very least.

Upon arrival at the dark farm we met the dogs and were shown our room, Jai Dev excusing himself shortly after to go sleep in the cow barn. After a brief battle over who would get the bed and who would have to sleep on the lumpy couch we quickly fell asleep, surrounded by the monotonous symphony of the jungle.

Drawn in the moonlight when I woke up at 3am and went outside
(the very excited dog who'd been sleeping on the porch not being very helpful)

Introduction

Hello.

I’m ‘Eggers’ from the title. My friend Sarah (‘Sarah’ from the title) calls me that, and while I would like to get back at her by calling her ‘Jaban’ I suspect that her friends at home already do that so the joke’s been somewhat taken.

Anyways. This blog is going to be about the two of us going to Hawaii.

Only about a month ago, Sarah messaged me saying that she wanted to travel for a bit, both of us having just graduated, and whether I wanted to join her. Basically we'd be working on farms for people in exchange for free accommodation and food which sounded like a fair set-up for me, and because I had a bit of money at the time and no further plans, I thought I’d be a fool not to go.

I still cannot believe it is actually happening.

Now, on the purpose of this blog. I’ve been trying to keep travel journals on family vacations and trips with friends ever since I was very young, and I think it is an invaluable souvenir to take from a journey. Normally I would write down the happenings of each day into my sketchbook alongside illustrations of varying quality of what I was describing. For this trip, I wanted to take a slightly different approach. Instead of somewhat cartoonishly drawing myself and my fellow travellers from memory and not very accurately, I want to largely do actual reportage, depicting the people and places around me from my point of view, as well as imaginative and experimental interpretations of things (the mythology lover in me is already itching to draw some volcano goddesses). I hope that this will bring a new quality to my travel drawings and I think that, when not in Maidstone under the inspecting eyes of certain infamous tutors, reportage can actually be fun.

So. I hope you enjoy these snippets from our adventure on the other side of the earth!