Nimbin

Well, how to describe today? Very weird I think.  One of the main things to do from Byron bay is to go a town/village called Nimbin, on a day trip.  Nimbin can best be described as a hippe heaven/Amsterdam of Australia I think.  Basically it's full of places that are trying to get cannabis legalised, and everyone there is a complete hippy, dreadlacked and everything.  It's a really cool chilled out place....for obvious reasons, but very very bizarre.  We booked ourselves on teh day trip the previous night, with a company called 'The Happy Coach"  which was run by a be-dreadlocked guy named Fred.  He started the day out by telling us a few really bad jokes (What do you call a woman standing between two posts?....Annette) boom boom.  Then driving us the 2 hours to Nimbin.  We stopped along the way at a lovely spot called Minyon Falls, where there is a massive sheer drop with a pretty high waterfall....normally.  At the moment it was pretty dried up (ironic considering the amount of rain) but the view was still lovely.  We then piled back into the bus and headed for Nimbin where we stayed for a couple of hours.  As it was a sunday the market was on which was really cool....a lot of hippy clothes, and lovely photo frames etc.  They also had an amazing fruit smoothie bar and I had the nciest mango, banana and strawberry smoothie. MMMmmmmm!

be happy!

Then the actual village of Nimbin....Every shop was called somethign that related to Hemp....'Hemp Embassy, Bringabong, Hemp Emporium...you get the picture.  There was also a Nimbin museaum, cleverly disguising a drug dealing industry, as once you get through the first couple of rooms there are people jumping out at you on every corner asking if you want to buy any 'stuff'.  Hmmm.  Then out on the streeets, there were people of all ages trying to sell us hemp....even at one point, a granny with her granddaughter!! Literally every shop, once you bought something they would whisper under their breath 'any marujana?".  They werern't pushy though, once you said not they just responded in the typical friendly aussie way of 'no worries love'. It was really surreal and bizarre.   

bringabong

Every year they have a 'Mardi Grass festival" where basically everyone protests about marujana being illegal....we missed this by one week...it's on next weekend.  After a bizarre but fun day we headed back to Byron and wandered down to the beach to watch the end of the sunset, then headed back to the hostel to have a night in.

happy coach!

the hemp embassy