My mother wanted to know who all these ugly people were?

So I took the obligatory trip from Byron Bay to the small town of Nimbin, and for those of you who have never heard of Nimbin, or have forgotten about it for any reason let me explain.....Some time in the 70's - spurned on by the growing population of American Draft Dodging, tree hugging, flower wearing types, the then struggling milk producing town of Nimbin decided to hold a rock festival.  

Through the resulting, pungent blue marajuana smoke that settled over the 5 or so thousand revellers, those few people who were still able to see straight, could just make out the entire local police force (Consisting of two) backed up by the local Mayor, NSW's chief of Police and his Deputy, surveying the happy and peaceful crowd.  The then, chief of Police, suggested that his officers should turn a blind eye to the presence of contraband, purely due to it's ubiquity over their own scarcity - and unwittingly set a legal precedent that exists to this day.  IE it is difficult in Australian law to permit something one day, and then return the following day and make an arrest, it is genarally belived that any such case would be thrown out of court.

So to cut a long story short, Nimbin is a thriving tourist attraction despite having nothing to see other than a lot of glassey eyed smiling hippies selling cakes and cookies on every street corner.

Obviously, in the interests of providing good copy,  I figured that as I was in Rome, I should don a pair of tight trousers, and duly purchased some cookies from a lady in a tie dye skirt and washed them down with some water from the local rain water tank.  Unfortunately they had no effect.

The bus journey back to Byron was quite strange.  For a start the bus on the way had consisted of 30ish quite normal looking backpackers, the bus on the return journey was by contrast full of over 600 of the most colourful, musical dancing people from the 7 corners of the earth. We sang and laughed while we drove over bright green hills and through purple valleys, waving at the pixies and fairy folk on the way, marvelling at the colourful birds that would fly alongside the bus and smile at us, at the clouds that would form the shapes of dinosoars and at the driver who was dressed as Napolien Bonapart, He would stop occasionally at various shops so we could stock up on buscuits and mars bars. This return journey took us three days longer than the initial journey, and yet we were still back in time for a lovely cup of tea.

So my advice to anyone going to Nimbin, is avoid the cookies as they are clearly a waste of money!

Me and Renaye are off to see Steve Irwin feed his kids to the Crocks now - hopefully I will get some gory photos for you!

Crikey

 

Eric