The waves as I go out for another attempt to kayak among the dolphins this morning are not quite so exhilarating as they were yesterday. The kayak trip is only marginally more successful in terms of spotting dolphins, as we do see a number leaping through the waves along the surfers, which only makes me want to be on a surf board. Not that I would get very far on these waves though. None of them come close to the kayaks though, the guides labelling this pod the snobby nosed dolphins.
My partner in the kayak today is not a guide, but a rather panicky plump girl who keeps trying to steer the kayak from the front. On the way back onto the beach, I tell her that we will probably get rolled over, which she doesn't like the sound of. When the inevitable dunking occurs, I am laughing out loud until I realise the screams coming from her are not screams of delight, but are cries for help as she manages to appear to be sinking despite the fact that we are wearing life jackets. I have to extend my paddle out to her to drag her back onto the beach.
I have decided that I will catch up with both Caz and Mary as well as Rhiannon and Gaz from the UK to Oz trip in Nimbin today, taking a pre-arranged Mardi-Gras bus there from The Arts Factory hostel just after lunch time.
I step on the bus to sound of a blaring Red Hot Chili Peppers track on the bus speakers, which is connected to a 1980s cassette stereo. I suspect I am the oldest passenger on the bus by at least a decade or more, but the driver at least is on the rusty side of me – hence the cassette player. He tells us that he has an obligation to inform us that marijuana is illegal and that we WILL get stopped by police with sniffer dogs on the way into Nimbin, which is an hour or two away, as that is what happened with his first load of passengers he took in this morning. Therefore, if any of us have any then we are likely to be delayed by people getting arrested, so he requests that if anybody is carrying any supplies then they need to be disposed of before we depart. Finally, our driver continues, if anybody is carrying any marijuana on the bus journey back to Byron this evening, then he will try to take a different route.
In the event, we don't get stopped by the police, which is perhaps for the best as one callow looking American lad of about eighteen confesses to possessing 'a couple of Js'.
The festival is a bit of a curiosity. It is like a little corner of Glastonbury Festival, with the occasional person painted all in green, and people selling hemp clothing or others happily dressed up in day-glo. The odd thing is that, although there are bands playing, spectators are thin on the ground. What are normally the trimmings of festivals are this one's focal points. This may be because the main stage area is the only place where you are supposed to have a ticket (though I later find it pretty easy to sneak in). It may also be because nobody has ever heard of any of the bands playing. Meanwhile there are thousands of people milling about the stalls and shops that line the town's streets or, so Caz and Mary tell me when I meet up with them, just staying around the campsite just a short walk from the town centre.
I can't honestly say I was particularly looking forward to Nimbin, as I seem to have punk rock blood in me, not hippy blood. However, it has it's charms, a bit like a carnival.
There are policemen about but I only saw one arrest. It couldn't have been because he was stoned and in possession of hash, though he almost certainly was, because at least 90% of the people here were too. I didn't see the whole incident, so couldn't really come to a definitive conclusion, but it was rather suspicious that the only person I saw the police arrest here was also the only black person I saw in Nimbin.
Generally though, the police were friendly, and some of their number were dressed in rather shabby uniforms, though I suspect these were the semi-official festival stewards and possible long-term residents of Nimbin. The humourless police in the UK would probably have arrested them for impersonating an officer. Not that a sense of humour is really something that I now associate with officialdom in Australia.
Rhiannon is in her element, being a bit of a day-glo hippy chick herself. With Gaz, who over the past nine months has made numerous disastrous attempts at adopting a hippyish fashion sense in homage, Rhi has been here all week having volunteered to help set up the festival in exchange for free tickets that it appears hardly any of the visitors have bought anyway. We spend a few hours catching up and eating pizza in the stage arena where hardly anybody has been, except for when they had the Hemp Olympics in the afternoon, which I missed. Apparently, this featured competitions for joint rolling, best looking joint, longest joint etc. and climaxed with the rolling of a very large spliff indeed featuring contributions from festival goers amounting to about $10,000 worth of marijuana, which was then paraded through the town.
As I have never really taken to marijuana - it makes me sleepy at best, or paranoid at worst – I get a little bored of people monging out, and I am quite glad when it is time to catch the bus back to Byron. Though it is not very late, the bus having left Nimbin not long after eight o'clock, the ride back is a very quiet and subdued one. There is certainly nobody wanting Red Hot Chili Peppers booming out of the stereo.
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