DAY 24 - JOKES

Because Henry is flying back to Canada tomorrow we’d agreed to spend his last night here going to Uncle Roberts with him and Joy, so after doing today’s work we got ourselves looking pretty and sat around outside for a while, waiting for Joy to pick us up or at least to email with her plans. When it was nearly 5 and nothing had happened yet, Sarah borrowed Judy’s phone to inquire and as it turned out, Joy and Henry were true to their ancient tradition of cancelling our plans in the last possible minute without telling us of anything, as Henry had spontaneously decided to go to Hilo for his last night. A bit pissed off we left to hitchhike and were immediately picked up by an older woman who may or may not have been a drug dealer, and, a bit further along the way, by a skinny old man with a ponytail called Koda.

(His real name was Dan)

He seemed very keen for us to remember his psychic website www.kodasplace.com (check it out everyone! Really psychic! Really well designed!) and went on and on about some psychic book he wrote and a CD he made that he really wanted us to have, to the point that instead of going straight to Uncle Roberts he drove to his own house to get the books, insisting firmly on signing all of them and then putting his CD on in the car. After he finally dropped us off at Uncle Roberts we wandered around a bit in the market and then went to get some cider, and whom did we immediately run into right after that? Bloody Satori. He was there with a girl who got talking to Sarah so I was stuck listening to Satori’s ramblings, as garbled as ever as he gestured around with his mood ring, discovered Viking villages and pyramids while gazing into my left eye and then suddenly got into role-playing mode, wanting both of us to pretend we were in medieval times drinking rum in a barn and discussing spiritual matters. When he got his jacket out for us to sit on the ground for this game I hastily fled to the toilets and implored Sarah to go and hang out somewhere else for a while. On the way to the parking lot we met a guy Sarah had spoken to at Cinderland with the melodic name of Husamuddin (Ooh-SA-muh-DEEN), who introduced us to his friend Megan, a short smiley woman with a leopard-print hat and self-proclaimed founder of the ‘Church of Wow’. They invited us to come to some sort of different dance venue a bit further away, which we felt up for and so soon were on the back of their truck going along a picturesque sea-side road. We were giggling quite a lot when approaching the place, not knowing at all what to expect once again, and it only got worse when we read the house rules for the event (called ‘Ecstatic dance’) which included ‘No speaking’ or ‘No shoes allowed’. Basically it was a big hall with a stage on one side and a kind of meditation shrine on the other and people dancing, spiralling around, swaying on the spot, waving their limbs about, doing yoga on the ground, embracing each other and so on. It was a bit weird at first but we totally got into it soon.

An old guy with a beard handed out these postcards with their fabulous outer glow effect and as much as I didn't initially like the word, this place was SO DAMN ALOHA

We even meditated for a while at the candle shrine even though my experience was ruined a bit when I opened my eyes and saw what looked like a mummy next to me (it was a fake one as it turns out). The dance ended at 10 and we went outside where some guy was selling coconuts out of the back of his car, huge green ones where you drank the milk out of a hole drilled into the top. Megan was so kind as to buy us some so we each drank a huge amount of coconut milk and I somehow managed to spill it all the way down my top. For reasons unbeknownst to me we were then suddenly involved in some kind of photo shoot in which pictures were taken of us with our new friends about a billion times with various different cameras, and THEN finally we got on the truck again to start our journey home. We should however have learnt from last time that one does not simply go home when getting rides from people one meets at Uncle Roberts. We drove for a bit until the car suddenly stopped near the beach and we all strolled around barefoot for a while admiring the trees and the moonlight. (‘Oh Wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!’ –Megan, repeated x100) 

I started sketching Sarah with a pencil on the back of the truck in complete darkness and when I saw the resulting scribbles the next morning I decided to leave it with that simple quality and make more of a Matisse kind of thing out of it

The journey went on from there through some kind of moonlit savannah area where we stopped for a urination break (during which Sarah apparently fell half a meter into a hole in the ground) and then came to stop in front of a little house in the middle of Nowhere where we indulged in ANOTHER photo session in front of a sweet mural painted on it. Other stops along the way included the warm springs at Poihoiki beach (Husamuddin could thankfully be persuaded NOT to go skinny-dipping in the middle of the night) and everyone lying in the back of the truck and gazing at the stars for a while. Eventually we finally returned home though and decided that the only possible word for todays events was simply JOKES.