Cough it up, Farm Girl

I have a cold. It's July, I'm on an equatorial island, and I have a freaking chesty cough and sore throat. On top of that, today was the first time in days that we got a few solid hours of sunshine and I think I got sunburnt, AGAIN. I kid you not, work this week has consisted of me standing in the middle of a patch of lava rock, shivering and hacking away like a Victorian urchin. We've been making a rudimentary road from locally sourced materials (digging lava rock out of the side of a hill, throwing it into a pick up truck and then throwing it back out of the pick up at the other end). Respect to the Romans- road building is hard work, and I doubt they had pick up trucks.

Some shit hit the fan when I got here. Our awesome 6 wheeled all terrain vehicle (a John Deer Gator) got stolen on July 1st, which sucked ass. It could handle the mud on the land and only needed one person to push it out if it got stuck, and I was learning to drive in that thing. As such, my first week everyone was a bit on edge. And then the pick up truck got stuck in the mud and took 5 hours, 3 strawberry guava trees, a ton of ferns, and a barrel-full of lava rock to get it back out. There are days here when you quickly give up on avoiding the mud, and that was one of them.

Apart from a mongoose we trapped on the land, I haven't seen much wildlife here. Animals on Hawaii basically fall into 2 categories- endangered and invasive. There's nothing else really. We saw some weird pheasant things on the land and they looked tasty so I guess they count as endangered. Apart from that there's a few cardinals and birds that look like starlings. And cats, dogs, rats. Mosquitoes.

I've been made honorary farm girl down on the land, which I like because it means it's my job to sort out the pigs and chickens first thing every day, so all the animals have gotten used to me. The chickens now eat out of my hands (but I don't have skanky callous hands so it kinda hurts) and I can usually distract them long enough with food to grab one. They're getting big so we should be getting eggs soon, and the rumour is that one of our two little spams is getting luau'd next week. I haven't named the pigs, I just collectively call both of them Spam. There's a lot of chickens that look the same (we've got about 15), but 2 of the more distinct ones have earned names- Rammstein and Dreadnought.

There's not much to do in the evenings unless we go to the beach. The beach has black volcanic sand and I can't really swim there because it's pretty ferocious but it's still a fairly good spot to chill out at the end of the day.

Today I finally got to do some yoga with my David and Rebekah and a friend of theirs. They do acro-yoga which basically involves being lifted up by David's feet and spun around upside down whilst being told to keep your legs straight and down, which by then is completely impossible because the concept of "down" has been erased and you now only believe in one direction and that's hitting the floor. It's freaky circ-du-soleil stuff, but you feel good afterwards. Hopefully I'll be much more flexible when I leave.

Anyway, as a last note, here's pics of me before and after the demon barber of Samadhi Village got hold of my hair:




As you can see, David forced me to ride in the back of the truck like a dog because I said I'd never had that experience. I'm on my way to becoming a fully fledged hick (no dermatologist wants to see my neck and shoulders right now).

From one small rainy island, to a volcanic one, to a small volcanic rainy one

Because my mother is always, and I mean always, right, I didn't have the best time in small town America. I got cabin fever. Having to walk 20 minutes in one direction to get to the laundrette and 20 minutes in the other to get to the shops, combined with the fact there was nothing to do but play Fallout 3 or casually shop, made me a little psycho.

It didn't help that my host's bipolar girlfriend would leave her dirty panties on the floor of the room I was staying in and conveniently forget to take her medication.

So I thanked myself for having a good financial pool, rearranged my bus, reserved myself a room in a Travelodge for $80 and shipped out to Portland. That one weekend made up for a less than exhilarating week.

Portland was beautiful. The sun was shining, and the gentle wind whooshing in from the river kept the world cool enough. There were restaurants. There were people. There were museums. CULTURE. Aaaaahh, sweet culture.

Portland Art museum was a pleasant surprise. There was an excellent M.C.Escher exhibition with lino stamps as well as prints, sketches, plans and the PS3 game where you have to use crazy Escher rules to guide your man around the maze. Seeing Metamorphosis 3 in the flesh was awesome, even if I did end up colliding with a bloke in the middle (we started at opposite ends). Other highlights include a piano strung through a tree playing a 20s jazz and a piece by Robert Notkin called The Gift, which I studied at A level ceramics. It's a mosaic of body part tiles arranged to look like an atomic mushroom cloud. Sadly, my low blood sugar quickly rendered a large section of the modern art terrifying.

Portland is full of hippies, homeless people, people who live in vans, and students. I got invited by a man down at the waterfront to sing along with him to Hey There Deliah. I fed tropical Skittles to a chihuahua. I bought an arboreal necklace and was constantly complimented on it thereon. A man asked me if I knew my ass was fine. Another told me I had a nice piercing. A third asked me if I would give him a dollar because his girlfriend was hungry. I said no.

I overslept on Monday morning. My alarm was supposed to go off at 5.10 and I somehow woke at 6.40. To put this in perspective, my flight was due to leave at 8.45, and I wasn't packed. Cue a freakout packing, sadly unintentionally abandoning several packets of M&Ms and my copy of Life of Pi, only a quarter of the way in. I made my plane. Watched Coraline on a badly contrasted screen 4 feet away without sound (refused to pay $5 for a headset). Gasped at how beautiful Honolulu was from above.

Hawaii was hot. I say was, because my first night was cloudless and freezing. Today it rained non stop and I got very very very muddy and cold. But it's okay. Hawai'i is a lot like a holiday in Wales- during the course of a day you may get sunburnt, frozen, hungry, rained on and cold, but at the end of the day I get to go home to a cosy cabin, watch movies on Kyle's laptop (woo, Coraline with sound), cook a nice dinner and get clean and warm.

BTW, Kyle is my housemate. He's cool. Of course, I'm bias because he lets me use his laptop. Tomorrow we get another housemate and then on Sunday yet another, but number 4 is only here for a week. The other folks (my boss, his girlfriend, the foreman) and I all get on really well, which is a relief after the friction in Corvallis. I'll upload some photos as I go along, but it's hard to take photos during the day when you've got a machete in one hand, a water bottle in the other, and chicken shit on your arse.