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)