On Saturday morning we left Byron Bay and drove inland for an hour to the small village of Nimbin. In the early 70s, a few students came up from Sydney to this out of the way corner of New South Wales and organised the Aquarius Festival and they never left.
Nimbin is essentially the Amsterdam of Australia; an outpost of hippydom caught in a timewarp where it's still the 70s. The one road village is covered from end to end in colourful facades and is partly dedicated to the campaign to legalise marijuana.
We were really lucky with our timing because we arrived in the middle of the yearly Mardi Grass (yes, you read that right) festival. All of the hippies in the country meet up to protest against the drug laws, turning the normally sleepy village into a hive of activity. Usually the village is pretty dead, but on Saturday it was in full swing with all sorts of market stalls and many times the normal population.
One of the main attractions in town is the Hemp Embassy, a mixture of shop and museum which is the base for the town's movement against the country's drug laws. Inside a couple of old hippes were running it and it smelt like, well, I'm sure you can guess! Aside from recreational purposes, the owners and their campaign pointed out the other uses for hemp, from clothing (Jesus wore it apparently) to fuel and food. MardiGrass may have seemed like a 70s reunion, but the was at least a serious motive behind it.
Our hour-long stop at Nimbin was amusing to say the least and we were extremely lucky to go there for MardiGrass. It's just one of those odd places that you can't quite imagine existing in a largely conservative country like Australia.
From Nimbin we continued to Surfers' Paradise on the Gold Coast. A huge resort town, it's got all the novelty and lack of personality that you expect, although it was certainly larger that I anticipated. We picked up a few passengers there, before moving off to go Zorbing up the road.
Zorbing is essentially where you and up to two others are put inside a large plastic ball with some water and rolled down a hill. There's not much more to it and it's a lot of fun, like an amusement park ride. It was an included activity on our tour, so most of us did it before we hopped back on the bus as we finished our day's travels by arriving in Brisbane.
Brisbane is Queensland's capital, a city of about 1.5 million and one that I didn't get to see a great deal of, staying there for just a night. From a brief evening walk, it seemed very pleasant though and I'm sure it would have enough to occupy anyone if they had the time.
