Wednesday 21st March:

We were going on 'Jim's alternative tour' to Nimbin today...and alternative it was. We had previously heard that it was slightly 'weed' orientated but we didn't realise quite how much of the day revolved around it. The bus picked up at 10am, well we say bus but it was more of a camper van painted in flowers and reggae music blasting out the stereos. The first stop of the day was.......the pub. We had a couple in here and the driver was very willing to let you drink on the bus, infact he had a cool box at the front to keep beers. As we were entering Nimbin he started playing 'because i was high' and explaining to us the use of weed and magic mushrooms - how they are currently out of season so don't pick any and keep to the weed.

Nimbin is such a crazy place, there is a police station down the road yet shops openly selling acid, weed cookies and magic mushrooms to name a few - we didn't quite understand how that works but everyone seemed to be cool with it. The place looked as though it was stuck in the 60's and evryone looked a bit worse for wear shall we say. We bought 3 weed cookies for $10 but they didn't taste very nice. They melt the weed in butter over 2 days and then bake the cookies using that butter, they made us very tired on the way home and everyone on the bus(except two girls who kept spraying everyone with water) fell asleep! On the way to the next stop we went down a rather steep hill and in keeping with the musical theme of the tour the driver told us how they'd timed how long it took them to get down the hill as fast as they can and found a piece opf music that length. So off we went - the two water girls thinking we were on a roller coaster! And us just praying we'd make it back in one piece! We also stopped at this guys house called Paul Recher who was very cool, had really long hair and spends all his money trying to protect tress and growing new ones. Although he was obviously loaded, he wasn't arrogant or anything just a really cool guy. He gave us a tour of his rain forest showing us wierd fruits and saying we could eat them as long as we didn't mind picking off the ants. He also told us that on his land there were 13 different species of snake and we should watch our feet! scary. He also had his own weekly article in the paper which he let us read and we were very impressed.

We stopped at Minyon Falls on the way back, had a spectacular view but unfortunately not a lot of water. We bought some goon on the way back (box of wine - 4 litres for $10!) in preperation for our night out with Gem and Vik (2 girls we're sharing our room with who went to Kent Uni and knew alll about the night life that is Chills, small world!) Unfortunately we fell asleep when we got home, the cookies must've had more of an effect then we first thought and so didn't go out.