DAY 75 - Swingin' hobbits

Sarah took her day off today and I was busy with the usual things all morning before we decided to go into Pahoa again – Koa was down on this side of the island for the day and wanted to meet up with us, and we were planning to go to Jeffrey’s 60^th birthday party at PeleAina tonight and were sure to find a ride there from Pahoa. We hung out with Koa and his dog for a while at Sirius Coffee before Sarah decided to go gift shopping and we parted ways again. We spent quite an excruciatingly long amount of time in Pahoa’s one tourist-shop (too long for me mainly because I don’t have any money right now) at the end of which Sarah only got one item (for herself) and another one (that she might keep for herself). We went to sit outside the Island Naturals health food store in the hopes of meeting someone there that would be going to PeleAina since that place is usually frequented by exactly that kind of crowd. So we sat there for a while, talking about some topics that made us very conscious of the two elderly men sitting right next to us, but absolutely no-one that we knew or that looked remotely like a friend of Jeffree’s showed up. 

We did however meet this wonderful leopard-print-bedecked lady and the pimping old German druid next to her.

Finally, after we met at least one familiar person, Andrew from the other night, the sun was starting to set and we decided to just hitchhike the traditional way and headed up to the main road. There we immediately ran into Five, a tattooed-and-dreadlocked-guy we’d met at PeleAina before, and of course he was going and promised us a ride right after he’d gotten something from the health food store we’d just been at. So we returned there and all over sudden were spotted by Billy and Thiago who were clad in scarily-patterned ponchos and trousers and seemed to be off their faces on some mysterious drug but claimed to be just ‘high on life’. They also wanted to go, and as did Andrew, which meant that in the end all of us plus another few people got on the back of some old guys truck and were soon on our way. We got some wine along the road and consumed it on the journey before finally pulling up to the place just as the darkness was beginning to fall. I presented Jeffree with one of the bee T-shirts that I screen-printed last summer and to my immense honour he ended up wearing it all night. Not much was happening in the activation room so we went down to ‘the cat house’ where well our acquaintances seemed to have congregated, including the hobbit and the snake-man amongst others. I had gotten a bit of a stomach-ache and Thiago kindly offered to give me a stomach massage for which we were led to a different room where he lit an incense stick and started wafting the smoke all over me while chanting in a language that he claimed to be Latin (but which was never verified as that) before starting to massage my stomach. At some point an 8-month pregnant girl casually strolled in and did some sort of energy-field-ceremony at my feet, concluding it with the advice that a pedicure would probably cure all my problems. My stomach ache eased up a bit (but came back with a vengeance later) so we all went back to the group and drank the second bottle of wine, where the snake-man was getting much too concerned about anyone in the group hunting dolphins and was just generally being his weird self. Soon after we were all summoned back to the activation room where the raw birthday potluck was being prepared. 

How the hobbit is alive I still don't know.

Pretty standard activities here included people constantly swinging head-down on the ceiling silks, doing other weird acrobatic exercises, howling, and playing on the billions of instruments that were found around the room, while we sat by the side and talked to some people, mainly this guy Adam who wordlessly handed me a stick of incense to hold and was super enthusiastic about all of Sarah’s middle-eastern childhood stories. Just before the food was brought out we had to sit in a giant circle and play a variety of drama-class games, my absolute favourite of course. Soon after though we could enjoy the food (which was unidentifiable in many cases but delicious in most) and just sat around socializing for a bit more. My stomach ache had returned and so I wasn’t enjoying myself too much, essentially just waiting for the people Andrew had arranged a lift back to Pohoiki Road with to finish up and get going already. We had to listen to a bunch more of Adam’s insane ramblings about genetically engineered human/animal hybrids, quantum physics, chairs being a government conspiracy to kill people and giving himself cancer with his mind, before our generous lift-givers, Mowgli and his Brazilian girlfriend, finally made a start on leaving. Adam kindly lent us some blankets because we were going to ride on the back of their truck and off we were – the three of us huddled together trying to not sit on the wet patches and ignore the increasingly strong rain all the way home, but we made it easily enough and were soon very thankful for being dry again.

DAY 74 - Mermaids are real

We did the normal work again today and, since the rain had eased up, planned to go to the beach that was right down our street for once since we still hadn’t done that. After just a short walk we were at Pohoiki beach, (where the small warm pond is) and settled on a kind of concrete pier by the water. The afternoon was spent alternating between swimming in the shallow waters and sizzling in the sun reading ‘Shark Dialogues’ to the point that we (finally!) got a bit of a sun burn before deciding to go back home again – just in time, it turns out, since it started raining as soon as we got back. We made some bean-and-pasta-based lunch and ate it in the bottom bunk that had been converted into a den recently while watching a documentary on the existence of mermaids, quite convincing as well despite their terrible CGI effects and the uncanny attractiveness of all the scientists involved. 

My interpretation of the mermaid evidence they found - I quite like the idea of hair on mermaids but these guys have understandably evolved to be completely bald all over.

Sarah was quite tired and went to sleep shortly after while I stayed in the kitchen with Mick and Cedar for a while trying to catch up on the blog. At this point also a new couple of helpers arrived from Louisiana – petite Shakti and long-haired James aka Phoenix, who would be joining our team in housekeeping and gardening.

DAY 73 - Sober Roberts

After some snide comments by everyone about the inexplicable huge smiles on our faces this morning we did our work for today and then got ready to hitchhike towards Maku’u, because I’d had a Christmas package sent to Judy’s ages ago and had been wanting to pick it up from there for a while now. Hitchhiking was quite the pain today as it was still raining on and off and no-one seemed to go anywhere near Maku’u, meaning that we had to hitchhike with about five different people, including some hippies in an ancient bus with a very complicated door mechanism and a very nice male nurse. 

Being back at Judy’s was surreal – Subaja recognized us immediately but everything looked a lot cleaner than how we’d left it and it seemed at first like nobody was home, until Jai Dev poked his familiar towel-and-headphoned-head out of his room and happily greeted us. Judy wasn’t there so we had to navigate our way through the house following her instructions via phone and soon had my package, as well as some of my trousers that I’d forgotten, and then left again quite quickly. We needed to buy some groceries in Pahoa as well so we went to Longs Drugs with the person who’d picked us up, and ran into Austin and his girlfriend there (from ages ago, we watched ‘Pirate Radio’ at their house some time) They were going to Uncle Roberts straight afterwards so even though it was quite early we accepted their offer of a lift there and were soon on our way, after having stocked up on the usual beans and nuts. After arriving I was quite hungry, and we got some pizza while I finally opened my package, filled with various Swiss Christmas deliciousnesses like cookies and chocolate as well as art materials, tic tacs and tea – I’ve got the best mum ever :) (Hab dich lieb Masschen!) We weren’t drinking tonight so everything seemed a bit subdued; we met a bunch of people there again including pretty much all of our crew from the centre – Stephen had evidently been nipping on the wine again and could not stop himself from telling us over and over how awesome we are. We also met this awesome dude called Dave who was absolutely entranced by Sarah’s shawl:

 We were quite up for just a quiet night in so we got a lift back with Cedar quite early on. At home we hung out in the kitchen for a bit, me enjoying my Christmas cinnamon biscuits, when Mick and Stephen came back and engaged us in a most surreal conversation that was as hilarious as it was uncomfortable - mainly just hilarious though.

DAY 72 - No Comment

It rained a lot today.

DAY 71 - Bin Fun

We awoke in the unfamiliar surroundings of The Goddess Temple and immediately went on our way through all the sleepy hippies to get back to our place in time for work. Hitchhiking went surprisingly smoothly and we were back just in time for the first of the newly-initiated Monday staff-meetings in the Yoga Hale – Stephen had, in true boss manner, invented a whole bunch of community-strengthening segments such as ‘the Hawaiian word of the week’, ‘Inspirational moment’ and ‘Gratitude expression time’ After that was over and done with we got on with the usual work and I was granted the honour of making some signs for the new recycle-bins:

How very exciting. This is my legacy at KMEC.

DAY 70 - Chromosomes

We’d sort of arranged with David to go to some sort of daytime ecstatic dance event today (it was our day off again) but naturally we got up quite late and while I dragged myself out of bed at a vaguely reasonable time, Sarah was very hungover and had to be made a ginger-tincture by one of our new guests, a smiley surfer girl called Ana. After taking it easy the entire morning and most of the afternoon we decided to go to Kehena beach again since we’d missed out last week, even though, through our lazing around, it was already quite late. On top of that it was extremely hard to get picked up today for no apparent reason and we had to wait for a very long time and get two separate rides before finally, at about 4:30 already, arriving at the beach. Once again, EVERYONE we knew and cared about was to be found here, and the inevitable had finally happened in that Satori had shed his clothes – thankfully he didn’t see us until he was safely clad in his bright blue sarong-pants again.

'Im a naughty mermaid'

We were both feeling rather lazy and antisocial and just laid around by the water for a while, only talking to a few people such as Shawn and Billy before spotting Peat and JonJon from yesterday, who persuaded us to come to ‘The Lawn’ again which is apparently where everyone goes after leaving Kehena. So we got on the back of their truck and soon settled on the grass amongst the various hippies there who were dancing, playing a whole variety of instruments, contact-juggling and engaging in a bunch of hair-curdling acrobatic acts.

Some more Kehena specimens.

I got to show my sketchbook to a few people I’d drawn which was very nice, and got talking to some people from Cinderland (Tiago who’d given me a back massage during the Kehena full moon night, a guy called Van who looked like a hobbit, and the famous Bonnaville) and they invited us to come back to Cinderland with them, and since JonJon (from this point onwards he will be referred to only as ‘Jon’ since Sarah and I both agree that that is a much less silly name) and his friends were interested as well we decided to join them. Cinderland seemed very quiet and strange after last weeks intense Taco Tuesday and I was feeling quite tired and sober anyway and so just settled by the fire while Sarah was getting engaged in increasingly bizarre conversations with Jon (J: ‘And there I was dancing away, and suddenly I see this alien dancing behind me!’ S: ‘Oh wow… what colour was it?’ J: ‘It was…it was just like my colour, but his head was just really really big! And, y’know, I just wanted to be like ‘Dude you’ve got a really fucking big head!’’)

After a while the two of them left to go on a walk and I remained by the fire, trying very hard at this point not to fall asleep. Peat came over soon to inquire where Jon had gone because he wanted to leave, and so we sat silently for a while waiting for our respective friends to come back. When that didn’t happen for another long time we finally decided to go looking for them, expecting them to be just around the corner, but after looking all around Cinderland and checking all the houses including ‘the yoooga rooommm’ and finding nothing, Peat decided to leave without Jon and his friend Natalie set me up to sleep at Cinderland in ‘The Goddess Temple’ so that I could meet up with Sarah again in the morning or whenever she came back. I tried falling asleep but was surprisingly agitated by Sarah’s absence at my side (we have quite literally not been out of each others sight more than half an hour for the last two-and-a-half months) so I went back to the campfire, where soon enough she turned up again and we both went to sleep under one sleeping bag with some sort of foam material as a pillow.

DAY 69 - From Dawn til Dusk

We woke up at sunrise with the sound of the ocean in our ears as well as the sound of some lady living up the road telling us off for sleeping on ‘private property’ so we soon packed up the stuff and got going. We’d heard a lot about a market event (‘Space Market’) that was happening on Saturdays that we hadn’t been to yet, and since it was right in the area we decided to go there and get some breakfast before heading back to work. The Space Market turned out to be a small venue very like other markets we’d seen since being here, with people selling food, fruit, honey, coconuts, tie-dye shirts, massages, tarot readings and the like. We got some cheese sandwiches and cupcakes to eat which was a very satisfying breakfast.

At the table with us was also this lovely man and billions of kids climbing on him.

David, like a true gentleman, bought us a massage each to compensate for having made us sleep on the hard floor all night, which was a very relaxing start to the day. As Sarah was having her massage I got talking to two guys who wanted to make her acquaintance – tall Peat and tie-dye-and-jewellery-bedecked JonJon. We talked to them for a bit but were quite rushed to get back soon since we were already late for work, but made some vague promises to see them in Pahoa tonight.

The tie-dye stand.

Thankfully Stephen was very understanding of our lateness and after only a few comments about my hair and the like we got going with work. We had sort of played with the idea of going to Kona for the night for some party that David told us about, but decided against it in the end and instead started considering some ecstatic dance event at a place called ‘Hawaiian Sanctuary’ that we’d never been to before, and alternatively just going out in Pahoa. Coordinating this plan with David without a phone was going to be a problem but we just left him a message and went into Pahoa quite early to get some dinner as well. We decided not to listen to the germophobic man from the other day and went straight to good old Luiquin’s, the Mexican place we always end up at, and had some pretty beasty meat-filled meals. We then got some drinks and sent David another message from an Internet café saying we’d wait for him at the Kava bar, which is what we then did – sitting outside of course because the bar itself didn’t serve alcohol.

There was some sort of open mic night there today and we ran into a girl we’d met after the rave last week, Robin (who is by the way the most beautiful and amazing female being on the planet – just saying) so soon we were dancing again which is how David found us. We stayed there for the remainder of the event, concluded by a man’s very beautiful piece on a hang drum, and then had to look further to where we could spend the rest of the night. We got some tequila shots at Luiquin’s and then found the ‘Lava Shack’ where some sort of live band was playing – so we were drinking, dancing and discussing some very private things for a few hours there. 

At some point of course that was over too though so we left and, of course, somehow it was suggested to go to the warm ponds again. To shake things up a bit though we decided to go to the big warm pond we’d been to way at the beginning of our trip with Joy, and it was ALSO somehow decided that it was unnecessary to get our underclothes wet when we could just take them off before going in. (Not our idea, of course, but skinny-dipping in the night just IS a rare pleasure) The big pond was a lot cooler than the small one and I spent the majority of my time there trying to find the vents in the side of the pool through which warm water came in, and then staying there hugging the rock until I was persuaded that maybe somewhere there was an even warmer spot. Eventually we were all pretty cold though so we got out and, Sarah and me sharing a towel, shuffled back to the car shivering and after having our traditional late-night shower, got to go into our warm beds finally.

DAY 68 - Fully

Today was another calm morning during which we did the usual chores and then had to decide on what to do for the night – we’d heard of some kind of music event happening in Pahoa but were aware that it might be quite expensive to get tickets, so in the end we decided to go to Uncle Roberts again - which is quite a new happening since we’ve so far only ever gone on Wednesdays when the market was on. David from yesterday kindly agreed to pick us up and we ended up going into Pahoa anyway to check the concert thing out and to possibly get some drinks. The entry fee for the music thing ended up being $35 and the 7Eleven didn’t have any ciders so we abandoned that entire plan and went to two other supermarkets before finding acceptable alcohol to take to Uncle Roberts with us. The vibe there was quite different, the entire market area was spookily deserted and there were much less people there than on Wednesdays, most of them youngish Hawaiian boys. We got talking to a few dudes called Kai, Davin and Moe who were quite cool and went on quite a drunken rampage trying to impress us which was quite hilarious, but Kai’s constant repetition of ‘Let’s go, right now… Fully, yeah, right now, c’mon. Fully…’ (trying to get us to come to Maui/Brazil with him) became a bit tedious after a while so we fled to the dance floor with David, where I had a great time dancing with him, highly amused the entire while by my own terrible partner-dancing skills. 

And these guys. I love these guys.

When the music was winding down and the boys got a bit too rambunctious around Sarah we decided to leave, but once again our companion did not intend to actually bring us home after Uncle Roberts, and instead suggested going to lie on ‘The Lawn’ at Seaview and watch the stars for a bit. He got some blankets from his nearby house and so we all settled there under some palm trees where we eventually fell asleep.

DAY 67 - Simmer down Francis

Sarah took her day off today, feeling really tired and low on energy, which we concluded to be the result of not getting enough iron, so to fix that, it was officially decided to postpone our complete vegetarianism until further notice and to go into Pahoa to stuff our faces with some meat (I wasn’t really feeling the iron-deficiency but hey, it’s important to be careful about these things…) The guy we hitchhiked with whole-heartedly agreed and in the process told us a lot of unsavoury facts about a bunch of the restaurants in Pahoa, which made us then decide to have some food from the buffet at the Health Food Store instead – chicken, turkey balls, beef and fish were all had, and topped off with a ridiculously rich chocolate cake that made me quite unable to breathe afterwards, and all the while two guys were having an intense spiritual moment right behind us which was quite distracting. 

The plan for tonight was to have a movie night at our place with the crew (an original idea of Stephen’s, of course) and we had been asked to get more popcorn for this purpose, making our next port of call the nearby 7-eleven where we promptly got propositioned by an old white guy in a fishy-smelly car in the car park. After getting the popcorn and fleeing the site hastily we went to hitchhike back and were thankfully picked soon by an elderly man called Michael. He showed us some photographs he had just received from a client (he’s a chiropractor), beautiful vintage shots of Marilyn Monroe and other fifties babes, that immediately enticed Sarah and led her to ask about meeting the generous giver, a photographer called Kornelius Schorle. To get in touch about that, Michael handed us his own business card – and we immediately recognized it as identical to a business card I’d been given last Wednesday at Uncle Roberts by a young blonde guy called David I was having an intense debate about smoking with then, and as it turns out, he is Michael’s son. After clearing that up, Michael invited us to come back with him to his house that was on the way and check out some more of the photographers work and meeting David, which we gladly did. 

After getting a thorough tour of the completed works of Schorle’s that Michael had plastered his entire house with, he offered to give us a small free chiropractic session which was utterly unlike anything I’ve ever experienced – he pressed down on various parts of the body while asking me to move my arm and then based on that tackled various spots with a weird little thing called ‘the activator’ or something, (which at points just felt like being shot on the bum multiple times with a staple gun) and he ended the entire affair by violently snapping my neck in a way that sounded like he broke a whole bunch of vertebrae but actually felt quite good afterwards. Michael, ever the matchmaker, asked David to drive us the rest of the way to our house, and we spontaneously invited him to the movie night with us. Interrupted only by a small beer explosion incident in the car we made it back alright and walked right into the very official meeting on which movie we would be watching – after what felt like hours of discussion and voting we finally settled on ‘Legends of the Fall’ and all went up to the ‘Yoga Hale’ where we all squeezed in on a single mattress and tried to all be able to see the movie on Stephen’s tiny laptop. The movie itself was rather all over the place but made bearable by everyone’s constant commentary (although Mick really needs to calm down his rather lad-ish humour sometimes) and not long after we then went to bed.

DAY 66 - Uhyeh, uhyeh, uhyeh, uhyehoooo....

Today was the big day after our one-week probation period, so after we completed our hours we got sat down by Stephen in a very formal staff meeting and solemnly told that we were doing well and would be allowed to stay on for the rest of our time here. For the evening we had planned to go to ‘PeleAina’, (Jeffrey’s place) for some sort of potluck event they were meant to be having there, but decided against it last minute because it is really far out and we didn’t exactly know how to get there, and nor did we know whether we could find a ride back in the night. So Uncle Roberts it was again. The relative remoteness of our new home here still catches us out every time and so found ourselves after nightfall just wandering along the dark road under huge trees rustling ominously in the wind, armed with only a tiny torch and absolutely NO-ONE coming by, which was rather terrifying, and to make matters worse, one of my flip flops (second pair since being here, and glued about 6 times already) broke again resulting in me having to shuffle along quite stupidly. Eventually (after having made it all the way to the bottom of the road already) we did of course get picked up finally and were safely delivered to Uncle Roberts. We got talking to a bunch of Hawaiian boys and stayed with them for a while, enjoying their generously handed-out caramel chocolates and beers while Uncle Roberts was experiencing some sort of technical difficulties resulting in the power cutting off every few minutes.

Completely unrelatedly, there was a little white girl running around holding a branch to her head. This what she looked like.

Shawn was, unsurprisingly, also to be found there and introduced us to a friend of his called Chris, and we hung out with them for a while, interrupted only slightly by Sarah’s desperate quest to find out the name of a song the band played at some point (‘Do you know this song? Uhyeh, uhyeh, uhyeh, uhyehooo, shoobilidoobilidoobilidoobilidoobabbadub ooouohh….’) In the end we got talking to the main dude from the band, a corpulent Hawaiian ukulele player by the name of Uncle Glenn, who told us the answer – it’s ‘Rua Kenana’, for the record. Shawn offered to give us and this Chris guy a ride back again, but (as was to be expected) was diverted by the idea of going to the warm ponds again, which we then did. The absence of Stephen there made for a much calmer and quieter experience and it was quite a fun ending to the night – the only unsettling factor being Chris’ tendency to break into his slightly pervy alter ego at random intervals.

DAY 65 - Siriusly too much cinder

Today was my day off so I spent the morning mostly lazing around in the kitchen. We decided to go into Pahoa for the day to get some more groceries, before going from there to Cinderland in the evening for Taco Tuesday. Walking along the familiar streets of Pahoa we decided to have a little lunch, but for once opted not to go to the Mexican restaurant but to a café called ‘Sirius Coffee’ – an obvious choice for any Harry Potter and/or astronomy fan I think. There we got some amazing cream cheese & pesto bagels and tea, and as we sat down outside to enjoy them ran into Alex, the dreadlocked guy from Jeffrey’s place, who was on the way to do his laundry. He hung out with us for a while talking about some deeply spiritual and philosophical topics as well as telling us all about the current developments at Cinderland – apparently National Geographic is filming some sort of documentary there soon, the authenticity of which seems to be controversial but everyone seems quite curious to see what will come of it.

Philosophy in the afternoon sunlight.

We also then met James, the old guy who’d picked us up a few days ago, and got talking to him about his hypnosis practise that Sarah was very interested in and which sparked a very deep conversation about childhood influences and such after he’d left. We got some drinks and started drinking in a car park nearby before then hitchhiking to Cinderland. The guy driving us didn’t want to go all the way there so we were dropped off at the end of the road in total darkness and had to cautiously navigate along the pitch black road through some kind of forest towards the distant sounds of drums, which was rather scary. Of course we made it though and were soon within the familiar living area of Cinderland with the fire and drum circle. There were noticeably more people here tonight (apparently a lot of people had flown in from the main land to be in the documentary) to the point that it was near impossible to find a space to dance within the drum circle and we ended up sitting on the sidelines for most of the night zoning out and watching the flickering shadows of the dancers...

...as well as the legendary Jeffrey with his trumpet.

DAY 64 - Oh technology

As our first work week was drawing to a close and we hadn’t taken advantage of out two days off yet, it was concluded that Sarah would not work today and I wouldn’t tomorrow. Not much of excitement happened for most of the day.

(I made a sign for the kitchen)

In the evening we decided to have a quiet movie night in – only that Sarah spent about two hours trying to find a movie (any movie!) to stream and was relentlessly unsuccessful. Finally she found some documentary on the sixties narrated by Bill Nighy on Youtube that looked interesting - so I went to put on the garlic bread that would serve as our dinner, but had no luck with that either and only after spending an embarrassingly long time pressing different combinations of buttons on the cooker did the oven want to cooperate. Finally set up with the movie and the garlic bread we started watching, but only after about ten minutes did the sound start glitching in a way that made us first think that this was an especially immersive editing technique to bring the psychedelic qualities of the sixties closer to the viewer, but it ended up just being a most annoying malfunction with the video so we had to give up halfway once again and just go to bed.

DAY 63 - Recovering

I woke up today in a makeshift camp-nest that Koa had built next to his brother’s and his girlfriend's tent, and soon went to find Natasha (sitting somewhere with a guy she met) and Sarah (passed out in the car) and we decided to go on our way home. I spent the first part of the trip quite groggily lying in the back of the car wanting nothing more than to get home and rest, but Natasha and her relentless energy and enthusiasm did not feel that way, which meant that we stopped at a bunch of beautiful places along the way that I warily acknowledged but couldn’t really scrape together the energy to actually enjoy them. After a long drive through the wide sunlit streets of Hawaii we finally got back home where we pretty much went straight to bed.

DAY 62 - No cheese and no lighthouse

To describe the events of this day I need to provide a bit of background information. So yesterday this guy Koa (of Kona beach back massage fame) invited us to come to some rave at Hawi Lighthouse, which is pretty much as far from us on the Big Island as you can get, so we were quite hesitant at first not really wanting to go to any mad excursions on our first few days here. We did however meet a guy at Kahena beach yesterday who talked about going to this thing as well, and mentioned some sort of psychedelic/alcoholic cheese that was going to be involved, which got me interested again. It took a while to convince Sarah but finally she agreed to come and we arranged with Stephen to take the following day off, got out three hours for today done and got ready to hitchhike there – about three hours drive. Luckily, by some mad coincidence, our friend Natasha happened to want to go as well and had given up because she couldn’t afford the gas money all the way there so we agreed to get a lift up there with her if we paid for some of the expenses, which was just a perfect deal for everyone involved. She picked us up in her little Honda and soon we were cruising north blasting out some electronic trance music the entire way.

Roadtrip mark-making.

We made a couple of stops (to get booze, to get doughnuts, to watch the sun set) but eventually we were in Hawi and just had to find our way to the actual venue, vaguely looking for any sort of lighthouse (there ended up not even being one – Koa you sneaky lying lil bugger). We followed some cars filled with people who looked EXACTLY like they were going to a rave, down a very sketchy road filled with potholes and deep ditches. At some point, even though Natasha had just very skilfully navigated around a huge mud puddle we attempted to drive up a little hill and ended up getting stuck on the ledge with the front wheels not getting any grip on the road. We tried pushing it back down to no avail and only when we waved a bunch of boys over who told us some special trick did we get it back down and managed to drive the rest of the way there without problem. The night was still young but we opened the tequila and went to check out the dance floor (populated by about a billion identical-looking 17-year olds in crop tops and furry leg warmers) where we ran straight into Husamuddin, our old Palestinian friend. We also miraculously managed to locate Koa in amongst the multitudes of people weaving in and out of the darkness, and I ended up staying with him for most of the night while Sarah and Natasha were off on their own little adventures. All in all it was a pretty crazy night – dancing, drinking, girl moments and the like, until the sun came up again and we finally got some sleep.

DAY 61 - Chillin'

My main job for the day this morning was juicing – first star fruits that I had to put through some sort of high-tech blender and then lemons. Quite a pleasantly mindless yet satisfyingly messy job. We decided to go to the beach for the afternoon, and hitchhiked to Kahena beach with a lovely older man called James. The vibe at Kahena was totally different to how it is on Sundays, probably mainly due to the lack of drum circle and insane people - it was mostly just old people lying mellowly in the sun, and about 95% of them were stark naked (which had quite an inspiring effect on Sarah). We stayed there until the sun started to go down, by which point I decided that we should try to go to Uncle Roberts and see if someone had found my phone that I ALSO lost there on Wednesday night. Needless to say no-one had, so we returned home soon and had a pretty quiet night in.

DAY 60 - So Bonnaville

Today I was on early duty and spent most of my work hours making beds, doing the laundry, and mostly trying to find sets of bed linens that actually matched. For the afternoon we decided to go into Pahoa to get some grocery-shopping done, and after being dropped off in the downtown bit we were overcome with nostalgia so much that we spontaneously decided to have a small lunch in the Mexican restaurant we’d been to after our sweat lodge day, and had a lovely meal there, talking about REALLY deep stuff. After that we got our shopping done (tinned beans forever) and in the check-out line ran into one of the guys from the hot pond yesterday who kindly agreed to give us a ride back. He changed his mind on the way however and dropped us off along the road, where we got picked up by another one of our acquaintances, a guy called Tiger who had been doing some sort of project on the farm with Stephen yesterday. On the way he told us about a so-called ‘Satsong’ (a kind of communal meditation event) that we was hosting that night, before going to the ecstatic dance at Garden Temple that we wanted to go to as well, and since our host Leonard had invited Sarah to come to this event as well we decided to go and then get a ride with Tiger to Garden Temple afterwards. So after very hastily getting ready we got into Leonard’s car in the early evening and went to the place. It was a large room with a rainbow wall hanging thing on the ceiling, pictures of Indian ‘masters’ everywhere and a bunch of people sitting around and meditating. Alarmingly enough, none of them was Tiger. We sat down and listened to a long sermon about something or other that I can’t remember anything of, watching a DVD of an Indian master giving another long sermon that kept glitching, and then were meant to meditate for a good long while but I didn’t really get into it and anxiously awaited the end of the entire affair so that we could go to the ecstatic dance – this clearly not being the event Tiger had been talking about and therefore we didn't have a lift there. After it was finally over Leonard insisted on driving us, saying that it was too dangerous for us to hitchhike it these areas after dark but then mysteriously changed his mind halfway there and dropped us off at ‘the highway’ which was actually quite a dark and empty road with an ominous cross lurking in the shadows and every car that came turning away from the way we needed to go. Finally however we were picked up by an old hunter named Joe who proposed to Sarah within three minutes of knowing her, and two young guys he’d also picked up somewhere. He had to stop somewhere to look at a jeep to buy or something, and by the time we got to the Garden Temple it was already quite late, which didn’t stop us from chugging down some of our ciders and Red Bulls and charging onto the dance floor where we only got to dance for about twenty minutes before the event was over. We’d met some of our friends there like Satori and Alex, who were talking about some sort of afterparty at Kahena beach that they would be going to, so somehow we suddenly found ourselves in a truck LOADED with hippies we didn’t know, our only element of familiarity being Satori sat in the front seat smoking some essential oils out of a glass pipe and singing a song about dolphins and something mysterious called ‘Bonnaville’ (which later turned out to be the name of one of the hippies) to the tune of a German Christmas carol.

I just had to start writing these down somewhere.

We descended upon the deserted beach in the light of the full moon where most people suddenly stripped themselves of all their clothes and ran into the ocean while others got started on making a fire and we somehow got involved in the longest back massage train yet, encompassing about ten people (and also the first time ever I had my ears massaged). 

Sarah had to flee from the slightly over-enthusiastic Satori after a while and went to the fire, where we spent the rest of the evening with people playing instruments and singing and talking and also spontaneously howling at the moon in regular intervals.

And renditions of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in the moonlight.

They all voted on going to Jeffrey’s place after a while but we needed to get home since we had to work at 7:30, and now found ourselves in quite a pickle because they would all be going in a different direction, it was too late to really hitchhike and too far to walk. We finally decided to go with them to a big intersection near Pahoa and then hitch from there, which the driver (an incredibly sweet guy called Tyler) didn’t recommend but agreed to anyway. After he’d dropped us off we waited at the completely deserted intersection for a while with not a single soul to be seen, but eventually a car drove up from a different direction and told us not to be stupid and get in, saying they would rather drive us all the way home than leave us standing there in the middle of the night where possibly no-one else would even come by until the wee hours of the morning. So that's what they then very kindly did and we returned as quietly as possible to our beds hoping we didn’t smell too much of campfire.

DAY 59 - Full moon madness

Our first shift started at 7:30 today and involved cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms first before being sent to a bunch of the cabins to take the linens off and wash them, which is pretty much what we did for the rest of our (three-hour!) work day.

And here's some black bamboo.

The afternoon was pretty uneventful but we had planned to go to Uncle Roberts again for the evening since it was a Wednesday and we were incredibly excited to see all our old friends from this side of the island again. Our online buddy Josh was on the case immediately after hearing that we were back and offered to pick us up, so after waiting on the street for a bit fearing he’d stood us up AGAIN he turned up with his friends Scott and Rob (still don’t quite know which one is which) and headed through the beautiful coast road towards our favourite place. It was very crowded tonight, with a huge circle of spectators in front of the entrance watching two fire-dancing girls.

The picture quality will be awful for the next few pictures because I accidentally left my camera in Shawn's car (see below) and have to use Sarah's, which, despite being super fancy, apparently just can't take decent close-up photos. I'll replace it when I get my camera back.

We ran into a bunch of people like Remy, Keahi and the Pahoa chicken man, as well as Richie from the Kona beach which was rather surprising. Also present was a guy called Shawn who we’d met here at some point before and we talked to him for a while as he was selling some sort of spinach from his stall. As the event was winding down I helped him carry his stuff back to his car and he offered to give us a ride back home, but, in true Uncle Roberts tradition, home was not at all the first stop. After we’d shaken off Richie who had sneakily tried to come back home with us, Shawn convinced us to come swimming with him in what he called the ‘Millionaire’s pond’ and we decided to check it out, the full moon being quite the perfect time for such crazy night excursions. The place we ended up in turned out to be the little warm pond we went to with Kyle ages ago, so we immediately felt like we were in familiar territory again and confidently walked up to the spot in the forest, where we noticed already a few guys were gathered - including none other than our boss Stephen, bumbling about quite intoxicatedly with the moonlight bouncing off his bald skull. After we all got into the warm water, he started rambling about his spiritual experience on the island but could not shake off his self-proclaimed business-pro manner and involved us all in a round circle of sharing our ‘heart-space’ with everyone, then involving everyone in a very surreal cult-like ceremony of bobbing up and down in a circle while singing some sort of ‘Oompa, Oompa’ song and then proclaiming himself our big brother. Finally after a while everyone decided to head home and since we were going to the same place as Stephen anyway it was concluded that we would get a lift with him so we squeezed into one of the guys’s truck and got home safely - although this entire evening was a bonding experience we hadn't quite anticipated on our first day.

DAY 58 - Chapter Three?

We got up early to call the owner of this new place from Lori’s phone and he essentially asked us to come in at 4:00pm the same day for a job interview – so any notions we had of staying with Brayton for another night in Kona side to sort everything out vanished and we said a hasty goodbye to everyone and were out of there half an hour later, all of our belongings swiftly thrown into various bags and dragged to the bus stop that was luckily only across the street. True to ‘Hawaiian time’ the bus didn’t come at all when our schedule said it would so we cracked open our ale from the other night and settled in for some waiting. Surprisingly enough the bus DID turn up not too late, but after speaking to the bus driver it turned out that we would have to change buses in Kailua again and that we’d only reach Hilo by about 4:30pm, as well as having to pay a dollar for each of our bags, so we decided to let the bus go on its way and hitchhike instead – a rather risky plan but not impossible. We even made a sign.

Of course we did have to wait quite a long time, with people constantly slowing down but, when catching sight of the huge pile of suitcases next to us, speeding up again - we were already creeping dangerously close to Cameron’s property to use the WiFi to message Brayton to rescue us, when finally a car pulled up; a lovely German/Indian couple who agreed to take us as far as South Point. The woman was a kind of alternative doctor and so we had an incredibly interesting conversation with them about medicine and various forms of healing, with her whole thing being a focus on blood and blood groups to treat any diseases. They dropped us off at a beautifully scenic ocean-view site and we quite immediately got another lift from there with an elderly woman called Barbara who wasn’t going very far but gave us a ride at least a few miles in the right direction. We were dropped off near a kind of forest where I found a gorgeous, really well-preserved spine of some sort of animal that I wanted to keep, but then grudgingly admitted that the authorities at the airport would not approve of this kind of souvenir. So I made some Philadelphia sandwiches sitting on the side of the road using my Matalan card for spreading while Sarah was on thumb-duty, and only shortly after our lunch we got picked up by an old white man called Karl. He was going to Hilo and agreed to even drive us down past Pahoa because he apparently had nothing better to do. Unfortunately by the time we actually got to the area, time was running out for him to get back to wherever he was from so he dropped us off just after Pahoa, in quite an awkward spot. Quite luckily for us a young guy with his dog picked us up immediately and was very helpful in actually locating the place – a beautiful property off the coastal road near the warm ponds. As we arrived (actually an hour early – thank God we didn’t take the bus!) we spotted two guys just in the process of leaving – the owner Leonard and the manager Stephen. They told us to wait until they got back and so we wandered around the property for a bit, where of course we ran straight into Mick, who kindly gave us quite a tour of the entire place, a huge open space with various cabins dotted about and hundreds of fruit trees. Shortly after that, the guys came back and the manager Stephen (he apparently's only been in charge for a week) took his role very seriously and conducted a very formal interview with us before deciding that we were fit for the task and would be taken on for a probation period of a week at least before getting properly hired. Because this was all so short notice it was decided that we would sleep in a little cabin with Stephen and another worker here, an elderly guy called Jason, until another solution was found – so this is literally a two bunk-beds in a 12 square metre situation which is quite funny. We just chilled for the rest on the day, had a shower in the lovely outdoor jungle-view bathroom and got settled in as best as we could in a room that doesn’t actually have space to open a suitcase. We had our staple dinner of pasta and beans in our new swanky outdoor kitchen with Mick and another older helper, Cedar, and went to bed not long after.

DAY 57 - What are you doing to us Ashton??

Today did not start out well. For reasons that will not be disclosed here due to certain people’s requests, we were essentially advised by Cameron and Lori to leave their place and to find somewhere new to stay as quickly as possible. We immediately decided to go back to 'our' side of the island and made a list of all the people we’ve met there and the places they told us about, and Sarah got e-mailing everyone straight away (thanks again!). One of our potential new homes required you to call them to discuss everything and since we were too proud to ask Cameron and Lori for their phone and quite wanted to get out of the house anyway, we decided to hitchhike into Kailua where we’d seen some sort of phone cards sold in the shops there. 

We hitchhiked first with a lovely old Australian man and then with a rather scary young dude who alternated between shouting down his hands-free phone at someone and blasting out the most horrifically catchy song of all time on the radio (‘DEY KNO WAT IS WAT – BUT DEY DON KNO WAT IS WAT – DEY JUST STRUT --- WAT DA FOK’ repeated about a zillion times) We went into the store to find out about these phone cards, but it transpired pretty soon that you would still need an American SIM card to use whatever this was so that wasn’t an option anymore. We dejectedly bought some ice cream instead and ate it on the wall to the beach, and then spotted a payphone which could be the solution to all our problems. Needless to say, it wasn’t – two of our quarters got stuck before even going anywhere and nothing happened except for some Chinese voice coming out of the phone speakers, regardless of what number we typed in. So we gave up on that and walked a bit further where we tried another payphone that actually worked, but only got through to voicemail. Seeing a café’s ‘Free WiFi’ sign we decided to check Sarah’s emails again on my phone and see if there were any leads there, but after waiting an eternity in line to buy our two cokes and then another eternity for the Internet to load we decided that we should just let go of this idea and go back to the beach we’d been to on our first day in Kailua. On the way there we ran into William, a guy we'd met that night, who invited us to come with him and his French friend to some sort of barbecue at an abandoned airport beach or something, which sure sounded exciting. Through some turn of events however we ran into another guy on the way and talked to him for a bit, and when we were done, William was nowhere to be seen anymore. 

We followed the road for a long while hoping to catch up with him but even when we then found ourselves in a vast area of emptiness that did indeed look like an old airport, neither William, nor a barbecue, or any human beings could be found apart from some old Asians doing exercises in a nearby park. So after wandering about for a bit we hitchhiked back into the main town with a lovely Canadian-French family and there spotted a table near the road where people seemed to be giving out free food, so we went and got some and settled down with two young guys chilling nearby, moustachioed Mikey and dreadlocked Emery. While sitting there we ran into Koa, the blonde guy from the other night, who was walking by with his dog and joined us for a while before heading off to the beach again. We decided to get some wine and then hung out with Emery and his slightly scatty but very lovely older friend Carl at a different beach for a while, but when they decided to go and play some music somewhere else we spilt up and went back to the beach we where at the other night. Reminiscing with Koa about the back massage train then got some dude called Sam interested, so we repeated the entire exercise again with those two guys and another one called Sterling, which Sarah thought was just the coolest name ever. Eventually of course it got dark and we decided to head off to pack so we could leave early the next day no matter what our situation would be. We got picked up by a very lovely guy with a ponytail called Michael who dropped us all the way home, where we ran straight to check Sarah’s emails. We’d gotten a reply from Mick the banana pie guy who told us that on his place there’d coincidentally been an opening for two girls for housekeeping at a meditation centre, and that we should call the owner tomorrow. Very excited we packed all our belongings and went to sleep here for the last time.

DAY 56 - Plenty of porpoises

We had been invited to come to some sort of Farmer’s Market with everybody in the morning, which turned out quite similar to our market in Maku’u albeit a bit smaller, and the weather was much better than it had ever been on that side of the island. We walked around for a bit and then got ourselves some cookies and lilikoi juice to be enjoyed in the shade, but weren’t really tempted to buy any of the artwork, jewelry and food that was on offer, even though I did purchase a little book on Hawaiian mythology in a nearby souvenir-shop. After Cameron and Lori drove us back home we decided to go to the beach once it got a little bit less intensely sunny, which we then did, together with Jan, the French and Cameron. Jan could only lend us one set of snorkelling equipment, so Sarah decided to just swim around without snorkelling while the rest of us got all geared up and went out towards the deep water where dolphins had been seen just before. We indeed didn’t have to wait long until suddenly there were lots of them underneath us, swimming in little synchronized clusters of threes and twos and coming up to the surface every other minute before then descending slowly into the blue depths again. 

That little old dude wasn't a midget or anything, he just kept going really really deep into the water and then floated about there for ages so I thought I should include him

Some of them were clearly up for a bit of fun and kept jumping out of the water quite spectacularly and twirling around. After a while I had seen enough and went back to the shore to give Sarah my equipment, and then just layed on the beach for the rest of the time reading before everyone decided to head back. After getting back it started raining and Sarah and I got Marina involved in a bit of gambling in the form of playing dice with us - needless to say that I won :)