A week of gay Hawaii

Friday morning and our week at Kalani came to an end. It was really hard to leave that lovely place - the communal meals in the big open air lanai three times a day, playing volleyball with a bunch of great big strong queeny campy poofs, the outdoor hot tub (under stars or in the rain) and the gorgeous swimming pool, the roar of the ocean in the distance and the incredibly musical frogs that sang (I can't call it croaked) all night like bellbirds. We met some great people during the week (once we got through the first few days of spending all our time together) and are having some fantastic adventures.

Like the day we drove up to the Volcanoes national park, having not really figured out what we wanted to do up there. It was getting quite rainy and we were in the visitors centre, had just come out from watching a video about volcanoes and the woman at the desk announced in a loud voice that she had a couple of vacancies on a cave tour. We wandered over. Turned out it's an amazing trip into a secret and rare lava tunnel - it only runs once a week and usually books out ten minutes after they open for bookings. Someone had just cancelled. People come from all over the world to do it. It was amazing - the tunnel walls and stalectites are all metallic (for a complicated reason to do with their volcanic formation), so it's like going into a dwarf cave of treasures. Plus there's some incredible bacteria on the walls that looks promising as a cure for cancer. We had to take a vow of secrecy that we would never reveal its location because it is so fragile.

Beverly, one of the volunteers at Kalani (which has a residential volunteer and artist in residence program) took us to the secret beach by the fallen tree and we snorkelled in little tidal pools and looked at the fish.

On our second last day we finally found the black sand beach nearby. It's really hard to get into the ocean on the Puna coastline because it's all jagged black lava cliffs and strong currents. There's one very cool hippy/gay beach, nude, drumming circles on a sunday, dolphins come in, trees growing out of the black sand to sit under. Getting in and out of the water looked bloody scary - a tough shore break pounding on to black gravel and rocks - we braved it and leapt in, headed out and met up with a pod of spinner dolphins - so named because they throw themselves out of the water and spin in spirals. The water was very blue, I guess because of the black sand - no hint of green. There were about 6 or 8 people out there, most of the others had flippers and for an hour the dolphins cruised around with the swimmers and we would applaud and cheer when one did a spectacular spin.

Today we headed around via the volcanoes again to the west coast for a few days of beaching and snorkelling before we head home early next week. It's a bit strange arriving somewhere new - Dragonfly Ranch, a bed and breakfast that can accomodate up to 16 people (rather than the dozens at Kalani). But we're about to go up for a communal dinner and I'm sure we'll get used to it!

It's been yummy just hanging out together and really having a holiday.

Lots of love

Jesse xxxx