DAY 48 - Yay or Nay

Since the weather has improved somewhat we decided to use our day off to check out the biggest town in the area, Kailua-Kona. So after being shown how to feed the chickens and blow the driveway by The Germans so we can do it tomorrow, we headed out to hitchhike and were soon picked up by an old Southern man called Jimmy who kindly drove us all the way to the town even though it was much further away than we thought. We walked along the bay-front for a bit where everything was saturated with tourist shops selling Hawaii-shirts and the like, tourist restaurants with names like ‘Bongo Ben’s’ and various tourist-attraction-brochure-shops.

This restaurant with its friendly mosaic stairs seemed cool though.

After a while we decided to sit down and have a drink, since Happy Hour for whatever reason is much earlier here than anywhere else I’ve ever seen and started at 3pm. We had some rainbow cocktails and then walked around a bit more, settling on a pier at the Northern end of the bay (after illegally strolling into a hotel’s swimming pool area but finding it not worth our efforts anyway). The sun was setting and the fishermen were fishing and it was all very beautiful.

I do gross myself out sometimes with all this cheesiness.

We had noticed that this town seemed to be largely populated by old people and so quite desperately wanted to find anyone under 60 to hang out with on this lovely Saturday night. Finally we got talking to two boys sitting on a wall near a little beach, curly-haired blonde Austin and stodgy Texas-descendant Richie, who invited us to come to the beach behind us where a little group was gathered around a young guy playing the ukulele and singing. We gladly joined them and soon were for indiscernible reasons involved in another back massage train with Richie, a blond guy called Koa and another guy called William (flashback to Christmas Eve!) We hung out with them for most of the evening, getting involved in impromptu renditions of ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Come together’ and talking to a bunch of new people like Hawaiian Josh and a guy who definitely looked like Paul McCartney (Sarah: ‘Y’know, that guy from the Beatles’). Finally we decided that it was time to go home since we had to hitchhike all the way back. We were first picked up by a guy who only drove us a little way up and then by a very sweet Asian man who went well out of his way to drop us right in front of our doorstep, which was very much appreciated since it had started raining again. We had some tomato soup (which as Sarah quite rightly pointed out, DID taste like warm ketchup) and soon went to bed.