DAY 85 - Another early night

We woke up from a rather restless night – Koa didn’t have any mats or similar devices to lie on and only some weird thin table-cloth kind of things to cover ourselves with and sand is surprisingly hard to sleep on. We had kind of forgotten that even though we didn’t have to work today, we were required to attend the 8 o’clock weekly staff meeting, especially since I had been assigned the ‘inspirational’ segment for this week so we stumbled out to hitchhike at about ten to 8 and ended up not even being that late. Luckily I got away with some heartfelt but not very well-said ramblings about my gratitude about my time here as the inspirational moment since I obviously hadn’t planned anything, and soon we were free to go again. A bit of a lady problem had gotten hold of Sarah again so after having our not-so-hippie daily shower and warm lunch we headed to Pahoa again to sort that out. It became a bit of a low point when we ended up sat on the parking lot bench next to the Malama market again and got talking about some of the ‘real life’ issues that we will soon have to face as well as panic welling up at how little time we have left. We got a lift home with a skinny black guy called Inergi who told us a lot about some sort of world-changing project that he’s doing, which was quite interesting.

It's been a while since we hitchhiked with someone worth drawing.

At home we gathered our stuff for Rainbow Gathering and even managed to, with the help of the legendary Cedar, miraculously find a rolled up bit of tarpaulin-like material in the ‘Man Cave’ that we sincerely hoped would turn out to be a tent, as well as some blankets and pillows. (Stephen had, in the rush of vino, promised to provide us with a tent but as it turned out later had nothing to offer but massive full-room kind of tents) After trudging through the forest again and finding a semi-suitable spot to set up near the Kona boys we unfolded our mystery tent-sack that did indeed turn out to contain a tent, but no poles of any kind. Figuring that it must be a kind of string kind of deal, because of the lack of pole-loops, but not really knowing how to set that up (as well as the tent being MASSIVE) we ended up getting some twine from a group of boys nearby that we set up going from one palm tree to another one and hooked the tent’s conveniently-located roof-hooks along a line to it. With the door facing the ocean and a strong breeze blowing, this worked perfectly and we sat in wonderment for a while inside enjoying the tent's bubble-like form and its ever-changing shape.

When we left to check out the kitchen area we ran into someone in the darkness that turned out to be Inergi with his young white friend who proclaimed that he had come here with the intention of ‘kidnapping’ us to invite us to some sort of probiotic bread-making event that he had planned for this evening. It took some convincing but eventually we agreed to go with them and went to tell Koa and get our shoes, at which point it transpired that I had lost one of my flip flops – item No 453 that I’ve lost during my time here.  Koa seemed sceptical of Inergi’s intentions and so suddenly Sarah changed her mind entirely about the endeavour, taking the missing flip flop as a sign not to go and arguing that we’d only just gotten here, so we had to tell a very disappointed Inergi about our change of plans and I made my peace with just having to walk barefoot for the next few days. We walked around a bit between the various camps but once again not much seemed to be happening, leading to us going to sleep pretty early again in our very own tent this time.