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.