Today all the lazing around of the previous days was over
and we had to present ourselves at 7:30 sharp to Cameron to hear our first
instructions. Today’s task was to go around the massive coffee plantation and
free the coffee plants’ stems from the vines that curled themselves around
them, as well as cruelly ripping off all the new green branches they were
sprouting, something that is quite contrary to anything we’ve done at Judy’s. (Apparently the new branches ‘zap the energy’ from the old chosen ones and
therefore have to be pruned constantly, but still. Just doesn’t feel right). We
got to work happily enough but were soon thwarted by the many spider webs
everywhere between the branches, which we could only combat by waving sticks
about in the air to clear them away and also had the added benefit of
making us feel like wizards. We were busy with that for the compulsory five
hours and shortly after were invited to join the hosts and the Germans at a
barbecue at the beach a bit later. The beach we went to was called Ho’okena and
was very beautiful, despite the very many tourists and this little creature
roaming about under the barbecue tables:
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| Possibly it wasn't even a dog. |
The Germans and Cameron wanted to go snorkelling, and since
Cameron had a spare set of equipment and Sarah didn’t want to go, I decided to
join them despite (quite retardedly) not having brought my swim stuff. The view under water was
(once again) nothing on Kenya, but I did see some very peculiar and colourful
fish and we even spotted a big sea turtle, even though it wasn’t quite as big
as our friend at Richardson’s beach.
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| My four favourites, and their Hawaiian names. |
After we got out again, the boys got down to work with the
barbecue and the girls started drinking and talking about deep stuff so Sarah
and I decided to take a walk further along the beach, which also helped greatly
in drying my underclothes. Shortly after leaving the others we found ourselves
in a weird kind of beach-ghetto area where shady men were lurking around an
illegal cock-fighting place where a bunch of roosters were displayed on little
triangular huts, which was quite a bizarre sight right next to the azure ocean and palm trees. Further along we found a beautiful ruined church that had no
roof and rubble everywhere in and around it but still had little offerings like
shells and necklaces accumulated on a little altar in the front of it.
When we got back the food was ready, and since we have a new
clause to our pact of vegetarianism that dictates that we will eat meat
whenever it is offered to us by Cameron and Lori, we were quite happy to get in
on the presented ‘chili dogs’. It turned out that half of the grilled sausages they'd made were actually consisting of moose meat, which is certainly something
new but tasted quite standard. The Germans had made grilled vegetable sticks
and we had a nice chilli sauce as well so it was a very lovely meal while
watching the sunset and listening to Sarah’s sixties playlist.
We had arranged with our online friend Josh (the one whom
we’ve never met and who never shows up – don’t ask why we still bother with
him) to be picked up at our house at 6 to go hang out with him and some of his
friends for the evening, so we packed together our stuff and headed back with
Cameron and Lori just before sunset. Josh seemed to have a bit of trouble finding us but lo and
behold, we did finally meet him and can now confirm that he is indeed a real
person and not a prank and/or catfish. Ironically, the beach he and his friends
were at was Ho’okena, the place we had JUST left. On the way we stopped at a
dingy little corner shop to get some drinks, but after discovering that they
only sold ‘proper’ wine with ‘proper’ corks and no-one had a bottle-opener, we
had to get some kind of ale that we deeply regretted afterwards (even the high
alcohol content could NOT excuse that taste). We met Josh’s friends who were a
rather dopey lot, and hung out with them for a while until suddenly Sarah came
back from the bathroom rather pale-faced with quite an emergency ‘girl problem’
that she very skilfully hid from the boys by pretending to have been sick and insisting that we had to go home. So we made poor
Josh drive us all the way back AGAIN after only this short while, but he was
nice enough about it and we were soon in our own domain to sort out the
situation. Sarah’s condition seemed to be quite alarming so after panickedly googling ‘lots of blood’ and, unsurprisingly, being unsuccessful in finding a solution, I went down to the main house to ask Lori for advice
on the matter. Cameron could not be stopped from getting involved despite my
efforts to keep this problem in female-only circles (both our hosts were rather
drunk after their traditional bonfire drink that we’d missed out on today), and
Lori and I were sent to fetch Sarah and then possibly call an emergency hotline
if it got worse. Sarah, despite feeling better already, was brought back to the
main house as well where we then both sat in their living room with outlandish
Christmas decorations all around us, and Cameron talking to us non-stop about things
such as various dog attacks on the farm, wanting to found a cult, or having to pluck
his eyebrows into a rounder shape so people would like him more - all of which was incredibly hilarious at the time. All the while
Lori was researching the effects of some medicine that Sarah had been taking
and concluded that it must’ve been that, and since Sarah felt ok again it was
decided to just leave it at that for tonight.
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