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.