Byron Bay
Byron, as it is known to the locals, is just south of the Queensland border, but it gets plenty of nice weather just like the Sunshine State. This was a welcome change from the chilly Blue Mountains, and after setting our tent up at Arts Factory Lodge we headed to the beach. Here we saw first hand the damage that bluebottles can cause - the lifeguard station had a constant queue of people needing treatment for bluebottle stings. This meant that my foray into the water was a quick and cautious dip - I wasn't in the water for longer than ten minutes, and in my time in the water I saw several stingers float by. Needless to say I beat a hasty retreat back to the sand to watch the welts inflicted by the electric blue creatures.
Cape Byron is the eastern-most point of the Australian mainland, so we decided to take the two hour walk along the coast to visit. The walk takes in most of the souther part of Byron Bay, rising up into some coastal forest and back down to a small beach, before climbing to the Cape Byron lighthouse. Besides affording spectacular views of the bay and the sea, the walk along the ridge to the lighthouse is a great place to look down into the sea for turtles and manta rays. When we were there we say a good dozen turtles and manta rays, though being so high up the cliff we couldn't get a very good look!
Nimbin
A short day-trip from Byron Bay leads the intrepid traveller to Nimbin - once a sleepy dairy town on the brink of disappearance, and home of the '73 Aquarius Festival. The Aquarius Festival brought many hippies and alternative thinkers into town, and they liked Nimbin so much that they stuck around. Nimbin was saved, and its identity was changed forever. It is likened to a bush Amsterdam, with liberal marijuana smoking by the locals, a hemp museum, and the Hemp Embassy - a pro-legalisation shop that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of medical marijuana. There are also plenty of locals offering backpackers cookies and ganja… though it does get quite annoying when you're offered weed a hundred times in the space of ten minutes! That being said, Marijuana isn't all that Nimbin is about - the Aquarius Festival called for a change in the way we live, and Nimbin has a thriving sustainable farming culture and the emphasis is on natural, organic produce and a way of life that has as little impact on the environment as possible.
Our first stop on the way to Nimbin should have been Minyon Falls, but due to the rough weather our bus driver decided to save the falls for the return trip, in the hope that the rain would have let down. I didn't realize it but the change of plans was quite a fortunate turn of events…
Minyon falls are situated in the caldera of what may once have been one of the world's largest volcanoes, and there is evidence to suggest that the trees growing here are from Australia's original forest cover that once may have spread across most of the continent.
As we were driving along the dirt road to the falls a campervan was parked just before a ford, with its drivers testing the depth to see if they could make it across. As we passed the van I realized that its occupants were none other than half of Tribali, a Maltese Roots/World music group, and one of them was a colleague from my time working at Salesian Press in Malta! Try as I might, I couldn't get the bus window to open, and I thought that I wouldn't get to meet my old friend and the rest of the group. Fortunately as we got out of the bus at the Minyon Falls carpark Antoine and his campervan pulled up, and we couldn't believe the odds of meeting! Tribali had been in Byron Bay since Easter to perform at the Byron Blues festival, and Antoine, Alessandro and Grigal decided to stick around for a week to explore. They had even been to the Arts Factory Lodge on Saturday night but Justyna and I were having an early night! It felt like we were destined to meet and the guys came around to the Arts Factory that evening so we could have a drink and a laugh.
Our few days in Byron were quickly over, but from the little I've seen I can see why so many travelers decide to stick around for more than a couple of nights - there's plenty of backpacker oriented entertainment, the weather's really good and the opportunities to bum around on the beach or surf the waves abound.
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