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.