Doof, Bats, and Coffee

Nimbin was basically still shut for xmas till the third week in January (I'm beginning to appreciate why those in Lismore refer to "Nimbin Time") so we headed to the Exodus Festival in Tenterfield for a dose of doofing goodness, and to check out a bunch of local DJs we hadn't seen in action yet.
Tenterfield is the furthest from the coast we've ventured, so we stopped off a couple of times to explore - first at Casino, where the skies above the river were teeming with bats (in the middle of the day, oddly enough, though it was quite cloudy), but the town itself seemed strangely empty of locals - the only people we saw were others heading for Exodus.
We drove on a few Ks beyond the Exodus site and had a look around Tenterfield - a pleasant and relatively prosperous small town, happily bereft of chain stores and chain eateries, and blessed with a couple of decent cafes and a museum to its only famous son Henry Parkes - whom I'd always vaguely thought of as having engineered the federation of the commonwealth of Australia, but it turns out he never lived to see federation, but only "inspired" it. I've officially been educated.
Exodus itself was a hoot - the usual decor, and the usual chaos of generator failure and last-minute improvisation, but also unexpected goodies such as a hillbilly gospel folk country family band stomping it up on the only stage with electricity, long into Friday night. We ended up finding the whole "rave plus baby" thing simply too tiring to do for three days, so we headed home after two, tired but happy - though I suspect the venue's petting zoo was the highlight for K (Exodus is held at a park that is a forest campground for the rest of the year, and the petting zoo bit stays open for the festival); but she was gutted she couldn't actually take the lambs home.

Over the following week we fed our growing addiction to wooden furniture that requires work, and then spent several companionable hours sanding, staining, and varnishing - bedside tables, a kiddies chair for K's room, and some smaller bits and bobs all got the amateur treatment, and then stood drying on the deck for a couple of days. We have also (finally) sighted the goanna that lives in our garden - he's a bloody reclusive fellow for something about two metres long! Hopefully within another two years I'll manage to get a photo of him for the blog.

Island Time!

This week, our house mate Illy told us she is pregnant. The next day, our other house mate, Marina, was up at three am to catch a last minute six am flight to Newcastle to see her sister who had just given birth to a baby girl. Its baby-tastic in West End!
I knocked off early on Friday so we could get the two pm ferry to North Stradbroke Island. It's a half hour drive across town and then a one hour ferry across Moreton Bay. The island is nothing special compared to Auckland's Waiheke for example, but for what it is, a low-lying sand island, it's remarkably pretty. We bumped into our West End neighbour, Chad on the ferry and were able to follow his conspicuous truck to the Island Time festival site. Once there, the most conspicuous thing was the complete lack of organisation for the volunteers. I pitched in, while C pitched the tent. C ran me back to the campsite for dinner, and we saw a dolphin couple playing in the Moreton Bay sunset.
After a traditional Minjerribah welcome ceremony, the festival proceeded in a friendly, small scale vein. None of the acts were stand-out to my taste, but I enjoyed the vibe very much. I didn't have much work to do as a volunteer (they never did get my name on the rota) and the Adder Rock beaches, less than five minutes walk from the festival site, are absolutely spectactular - tree line down to the beach, pristine white sand, picturesque headlands and the Brisbane lights in the distance after sunset.
On Saturday, We used a lull in the program to head inland to Stradbroke's Brown Lake. So called because of the colour of the water due to the infusion of tea-tree oils from the tea-tree plants around the edge, it made a good picnic spot, but seemed in part to be populated by refugees from the reggae festival, who were regretting booking their family camping trip to coincide.
By Sunday morning, we were having such a good time on the island that we drove to the ferry office, and changed our tickets to Monday so we could stay an extra day and catch Chad on stage with SchoolFight, sneak in some body-boarding and (of course) the obligatory post-festival doof on the beach.

Mardi Grass

The much anticipated Mardi Grass is upon us. Some residents were to be seen packing and fleeing throughout Friday afternoon.
Mardi Grass and similar events have a long history in Nimbin. These days it's Australia's biggest annual anti-prohibition event, with cannabis law reform campaigners from all over Oz, and speakers from around the world. We made it to the traditional opening - an aboriginal speech of welcome, then the lighting of the torch in the Peace park. The 2007 event was billed as Mardi Grass 007 - License to Mull, which unfortunately doubled the punning opportunities for all the low-down dirty local punmeisters. I won't punish you by relaying any of their efforts, dear reader.
A Saturday highlight was the arrival of the kombi konvoy into the village; A long line of (mostly) shiny, decked out kombi vans did a lap of the village before parking up en-masse at the Nimbin cattle mustering yard, while hundreds of people lined the streets of the village to cheer them on.
I then missed out on a chunk of the festivities, when I spotted that a local was flogging his old mountain bike for fifty bucks - and I've been hunting for a cheap, functional mountain bike for a while. I left the guy with a tenner, and went to raise the rest of the money. The only outdoor cashpoint in the village had a queue that looked to be taking around 70 minutes. The only other cashpoint, in the pub, was out of cash. The village store (who do cashback on debit card purchases) had overloaded their EFTPOS system and were only taking cash. By the time I sorted my life out, C had pretty much finished photographing the passing kombi konvoy, so we jammed the bike into the back of the car and headed home for a mid-afternoon snooze.

Any self-respecting festival has at least one "fringe" event, and in the Mardi Grass's case it's the "Open Mind Freedom Festival" or Doof, as Aussies cheerfully refer to most events featuring the sort of outdoor music discriminated against under the UK's criminal justice act. Having been let down by our contact who'd promise to ring and let us "know what's up" we set out Northwards, suspecting that finding a large, amped up trance festival with accompanying light-show and bus-loads of young revellers should not be too hard in the otherwise peaceful forests. Sure enough, a steady stream of cars led the way, and soon we were parked up on the roadside and trekking over a hill (well, two) to the site of the doof.
The whole site was outdoors, in a freshly mowed grassy area in the middle of mixed forest. The DJ booth was a specially modified kombi van, the atmosphere was chilled and happy, and the beats were mostly to my taste - often with a fairly hard "psy" edge, but mostly managing to maintain a housey/dubby feel nevertheless, which was in keeping with both mood and occasion. I have to confess that (for reasons I feel no need to explain) being somewhat more reliant on adrenaline and stamina than is my usual wont, I keeled over at around 2:30, and then drove home after an enjoyable spell on my back in the chai tent watching the pretty lights light up the treetops and the clouds scud across the moon.
Sunday at Mardi Grass is anti-prohibition parade day - the parade is led off by local guys from the Bundjalung nation, and their kids with banners. Next came the Ganja Faeries, the Plantem (Nimbin's own prohibition-busting superhero), the big joint (which spends much of its time outside parliament in Canberra reminding politicians of the idiocy of prohibition), and an array of interesting contestants in the "best costume" contest. We foiled our own cunning plan to take another afternoon rest quite comprehensively. We had thought to turn a bit of a profit from the weekend by renting out rooms (there always seems to be more demand than supply over the long weekend) but we didnt' get any calls about our adverts on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, so we'd forgotten all about it. Then, on Sunday early evening three people phone up, needing a place to stay. We rush around frantically tidying up. They call back - they're lost. Then (presumably falling victim to the complete lack of mobile phone coverage beyond the village centre) they go incommunicado. I kick myself for not following my initial instinct to tell them to wait by the pub for me to pick them up.
Most locals are back to work in the morning, and Nimbin looks remarkably tidy and "put back together again". I'm in the fortunate position of working over the border in Queensland, where the first Monday in May is a bank holiday - but I must be getting too old for the partying, because even a day and a half is not feeling like enough recovery time as I type this.
Apologies if this entry is less coherent than usual. Maybe a gallery of Mardi Grass Photos will make up for it. Peace out. And stuff.