It’d been
raining on and off all night and in the morning the design flaws in our
tent-set-up method could definitely be felt, in that, while at least we weren’t
soaked, there was a sense of omnipresent dripping and a rather large puddle
forming at the bottom where the unfortunate Thiago was sleeping. I was wide
awake soon and fought my way out of the soggy door to see what was going on
outside, where I was promptly invited to join Koa and his friends in someone’s
tent – not much else could really be done because it was still raining steadily
and their tent proved to be not much better than ours in its inability to not drip
constant cold water down the back of my neck. I stayed with them for a while,
staring out the door at the rainy ocean while trying to comfort poor Lono who
was lying around quite pathetically with a huge blue cast on his leg that
seemed to confuse him a great deal.
 |
| Bleak times. |
When the rain eased up just a little bit I
went back to our tent to propose just packing up and leaving now to Sarah – it
took a while to get her and Thiago to wake up in the first place but she agreed
and we got going on collecting all our stuff from the various folds of the
deflated tent that it had disappeared into, and spent absolute hours trying to
wring all the water from our blankets before finally folding up our sandy and
wet tent. We wanted to have a last look at the kitchen to see what was going on there but it started
pouring it down again so that after a while of standing huddled under the two
tarps there with loads of people we didn’t know most of, we realized that now
that we packed together our tent, all our stuff was just sitting out in the
open and ran back to save it, deciding to brave the rain and go now rather than
wait until it eased up. It was quite an appropriate setting for our dark
moods, spending our last morning in Hawaii miserably dragging ourselves along
through the cold downpour with our various bin bags full of soggy blankets. When we reached Satori’s teepee I begged Sarah to
take a break so we stood under their little tarpaulin-roof for a while – at some point a girl that neither
of us had spoken to before gave us a heartfelt speech about our leaving and
presented us with a ring each, which was weird but of course an incredibly nice
gesture.
After a while we felt energized enough to keep going, and through a
complete God-send ran into a guy called Sean who’d given us a lift yesterday
and who was leaving just then with his car, meaning that we didn’t have to
hitchhike in our dripping clothes with multiple bin bags under our arms – a
huge relief. At home it wasn’t raining quite so much and so we immediately got
to work hosing the tent off and putting the blankets into the washing machine,
before returning to our room to do the last amount of packing. That’s at least
what we said we did, in reality it was more like dejectedly slumping on the
floor and talking about how much we didn’t want to leave – I believe I actually
burst into tears at the sight of the little bag-closer-thingy off my last bag of
raisins.
For the afternoon Stephen had arranged to have some goodbye-pizzas
with all of the gang, which was really nice despite the fact that Sarah and I
could not shake the feeling of utter dread and despair at the prospect of
leaving while everyone else didn’t take it quite so seriously and had to
audacity to actually speak of other topics, while we were slumped over the table feeling our hearts splintering in our chests. Finally the time had come to say
our goodbyes to everyone, cause for more tears and snivelling, before loading
our suitcases into the car and going on our way to the airport with Stephen.
That rascal had packed a bottle of vino for the road and generously passed it
around so that we were soon quite merry. He knew that we hadn’t yet seen the
Lava Tree State Park and so we made a stop there, jogged around for a bit,
posed for some photos and went on our way again. We’d requested to go to
Walmart one last time to get some last-minute souvenirs so that was the next
stop – Sarah’s sense of fashion seemed to have been impaired by the vino quite
dramatically. When weighing in our suitcases by the airport it transpired that
Sarah’s one was non-surprisingly overweight and so we had to embark on quite a
complicated mission of transferring some of her stuff into my suitcase (but not
too much since mine was on the verge) and heartbrokenly getting rid of a bunch
of clothes and shoes. After that, Stephen took us to ANOTHER park, which meant
that when we did finally get back to the airport we were quite late already,
resulting in us panickedly running across the airport with ‘Final Call - Could
Sarah Jaban and Kirstin Eggers please make their way to Gate 18..’ coming
through the speakers – it felt like we were in a movie. Of course we made it
though and were soon on our way to LA, leaving behind this wonderful island. I'm sure we'll return!
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