Rain in Byron and Rainbows in Nimbin

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Byron Bay is a fairly small town on the East coast with several beaches which attract surfers. When we arrived it was raining and feeling rather weary after a sleepless night on the bus we made our way to our hostel. We were staying in a dorm as we had been given discount vouchers by the company we booked our trips with in Sydney. We don't normally sleep in dorms but we were prepared to give it a go to save money. After being in there for 5 minutes we decided we would move to a double room once we had done our 2 discounted nights in the dorm. It's impossible to unpack and spread out in a dorm and i certainly can't relax on the bed in my boxers and read a book.

Our first day in Byron Bay was not so good, it was raining, we were tired and we were starting to miss the challenge and weirdness of life in South America. This hadn't effected us in New Zealand as the comforts of home were a novelty but now in Australia the familiarity we'd enjoyed in New Zealand seemed dull, especially in this touristy, faceless town. We also began to realise that the travelers in Australia tended to be much younger than those in South America (and us) and were traveling with different intentions to us. Instead of being on a journey of self discovery or wanting to learn about other cultures they were here to get drunk, dance to Chumbawumba and try to 'get off' with anyone stupid enough to take their bait. That's not to say that we don't enjoy getting drunk and dancing like Mr Bean till the sun comes up but we prefer to do it somewhere different to types of places you get back home. We spent the day just looking round the small town, although it wasn't so nice in the rain. That night we were feeling a bit more chirpy and after a sing song with a guitar in the hostel we decided to join some people who were heading to a deserted house on the beach to have some drinks and sing some songs. So of we went with our bag of goon (goon is the term used for cheap bags of wine, if you can really call it wine) and a mug we'd stolen from the hostel. Classy stuff.

The following day the sun was shining so we decided to head down to the beach and catch some rays and have a swim, that is about as exciting as the day got. We also booked a day trip for the next day to a town called Nimbin.

Our trip to Nimbin was definitely the highlight of an otherwise event-less stay in Byron Bay. Nimbin is situated in a part of the country known as the 'Rainbow Region' and is culturally important to the Bundjalung Aboriginal Australians and has become a haven for Australia's counterculture in recent decades. Nimbin was a sleepy dairy town until 1973, when the Aquarius Festival, a large gathering of university students, alternative lifestylers, 'hippies' and party people, was held in the town. After the festival many participants and festival goers remained in Nimbin to form communes and other multiple occupancy communities. The region has attracted many writers, artists, musicians, actors and environmentalists. The most prominent recreational substance of choice in Nimbin as you would expect for a bunch of hippies is Cannabis. The cultivation, selling and possession of cannabis is illegal however in Nimbin it is a part of every day hippie culture. The place has a high tolerance for cannabis, with the open buying, selling and consumption of locally grown cannabis on the streets. If you are ever in Nimbin and you hear someone shout 'taxi!' this is the code word to let people know the police are in the area.

Our tour guide was a real, bonrfide old-school hippie who had a uncanny resembelence to my record producer, Will. Our transport was a brightly painted, clapped out, old school bus which apparently was the second oldest bus on the roads in the region and the his commentary on the tour was accompanied by cool tunes by Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and other suitably psychedelic bands. Our first stop was in Nimbin itself and we had a couple of hours to have a look around and browse all its brightly painted shops. We went into the town museum which had a anti-corporate theme and was full of colourful hippie paraphernalia. There was a sign on the wall saying 'every child is born an artist, the challenge is to remain one when you're older', we liked that. It was a very weird place with alot of very strange characters. Everyone obviously seemed very 'chilled out' and happy but there was also a rather sinister feeling to the place, like some sort of 60's cult community that ends up with everyone killing themselves.

Our next stop was to visit a 'rat bag hippie extraordinaire', to quote our guide, who lived out of town on a huge area of land that he had bought and turned into a sort of botanical garden. The land had originally been grassland but now, 30 years on, it was teeming with wildlife and tropical plants and trees. The owner was an upstate New Yorker but had lived this hippie lifestyle in Australia for years and he was everything you'd expect from a hippie, long hair, baggy trousers, all the usual cliches. He was very intelligent and had a lot to say about the state of the world today which made a lot of sense, he also said a lot of things that didn't make sense, perhaps down to years of substance abuse. After spending some time here we made our way to our last stop which was a viewing platform for a waterfall in amongst the forest before making our way back to Byron Bay.

We spent one more rainy day in Byron Bay doing nothing before making our way up the coast to Noosa.

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