We had a lovely late breakfast in Post Macquarie and got back, a bit browbeaten, into the car and the familiar rhythm of fifth gear driving on straight lines. It was hard to keep our happiness up. So we decided, fuck it, no matter how long it takes or how hard we have to drive, it's Nimbin time, ASAP.
So we took the main highway on to Sydney, about 180km from our start point. Things got a bit choppy and it was a tense drive through the Sydney streets, at high speed, tight lanes, angry drivers and many shunting stops for traffic, but we got through unscathed, despite anxious glances at the watch whilst stop-starting and low-gearing through. And from Sydney, the roads deteriorated drastically. No more beautiful two lane dual carriageway to overtake the slow coaches, it turned to two way roads where overtaking opportunities were scarce and frustration and too-low-speed driving was getting to me. The beautiful ever-changing verdant scenery was continually amazing, and it was just nice to be out of the mad 6 lane highway and constant lane-merging, picking, choosing and half-panicked half-exhausted orienteering in Sydney. We found another hickish town to pause for hick lunch in. Not much to be said about it, its fading from memory, except that beetroot does not belong in burgers and people around there don't seem to know what chicken soup is.
Nimbin, in my little group of close friends, has it's own lore. It's a sort of stoner beacon that beckons every midnight toking backpacker to it. It's renowned for forgotten nights of thick weed brain fog, strange encounters with the shabby locals when trying to score, and a town that literally stops dead at 6 for all its inhabitants to roll up, toke up and get some downtime. It's like if Amsterdam were moved to my tiny town, Castleconnell, and never expanded further. It seems to exist for locals to grow their own and powered by curiosity tourism and gawking at the very strangeness of its existence.
We were desperate to get there as soon as possible, if only to take a break from the constant driving, and to get there, we had to drive some back-roads through another isolated berg named Lismore. This meant taking a turn off the main highway onto much smaller fare, with plenty of curves, trees and wildlife to distract.
For the entire 122 odd km from the highway to Lismore on that weird little road, we didn’t meet one other car going the same direction as us. We met a few going the other way, and they seemed like flies, buzzing angrily along the road desperate to get somewhere, anywhere other than the nowhere we were on the weird Australian purgatory of that road.
The feeling of total loneliness comes upon you suddenly, but on those roads, it was like a hitchhiker you immediately regretted picking up.
I decided to get on and ignore it, and turned concentration to steering the car hardfast through turn and tail on its slippery feet on dampy forest roads. I was eyeing always the close treescape; weary of deer, koala, kangaroo or whatever else that could threaten the rental car and cost me a fortune in minimum accident excess. But that aside, I was still going very very fast, about 140km/h on a 100km limit road. I swung the back of the car around corners, and gunned it sharp, braking before each and accelerating cold fast and steely into each corner. The aggression of this road stretch gave me some relief, yet again arriving just in time. It seems if I hang in and grin and bear the strangeness of my own thoughts, eventually I can kill it with some sweet relief in the simpler things.
As I was starting this drive, Lismore, our intermediate destination, was hit with the worst hailstones in its or New South Wales' recent history, and was fast on the way to being declared an official disaster zone. When we arrived, there were leaves, torn from the trees, masking every street. New South Welshmen stood puzzling, surveying their cars, and practicing amateur actuary whilst breathing in deep and sighing. Cars were pockmarked with dents, trees were down, windows were broken, the whole place just seemed beat down and wrecked. And this is one of those small Australian hick towns. Its not your common backpacker resort, it's off the beaten and just exists for the locals. A red neck pollop between Sydney and Brisbane connected by shitty roads, with a few tourist concessions to its proximity to much greater towns, but largely an angry buzzing little hubbub of petty masculinity, like fifties Texas. The cognitive dissonance of hating non-locals versus needing the tourists seems to have given everyone in town a headache. So we drove on through the disaster zone, delighted that we decided to take time over breakfast, as if we had left an hour early, the rental car would look like a colander.
So on we went, the short hop from Lismore to Nimbin, running into 5:30 6pmish before we managed it, The road from Lismore to Nimbin got worse again, strange flitty tight turns, roads like yo-yo dieters, widening and thinning rapidly and without warning. Cars sped past in both directions, overtaking devil-may-care on tight corners.
I took it slow, tired from all the exertion, and barely broke the speed limit, though I did barely break it the whole way, encouraged by local driving.
First off, Nimbin is the smallest town you have ever been to. It's just a tie-dyed little street, in the middle of nothing. A peculiarity of nature, a strange mountainshape of three fingers pointing up mark the skyline, flanking you on the left as you drive in. A restaurant, a bar, some shops that close before 6 and some backpacker lodges. During the day it bustles with tourists, and street performers, but at night, the town likes to get down to its main hobby, the intensive abuse of locally sourced and spicy marijuana.
So when we got there, we got there to a town with one shop open, one bar open, and one restaurant open. Tourists ambled wide-eyed, either waiting desperately for the offer of maryjane from some of the scruffier drug-addled locals, or desperately trying to avoid it.
I walked to the shop, bought tobacco. On the way the offer came, loud, one-worded. We accepted quicksharp, delighted. He took us into a little zip-down style tent door on the dark fringe of the tiny town. The front porch marked the waterline where the electric lights of the town went no further, so as the place we were entering was almost entirely obscured in the thick soup of fresh dark.
In through the door, by pulling some string that was rigged to some ingenious pulley system in a way I didn't understand and we arrived in a tent-like habitation that had clearly been there forever. The rope-pulley system ran through the whole 15 feet of shambly tent, and this told the owners whenever anyone was about to walk in. The floor was pebble-clad, and there were sofas lined up, places to chill out and sit down. The only light came from coloured rope lights on the ceiling and flickering TVs showing Mexican cartoons and music videos at low volume. The entire structure was canvas and detachable. There was no back wall that was just a patio onto the backgarden. We didn't go further than the tent-room, but could continually hear cute dogs squabbling and inane chatter from the back as we sat waiting. Some more largely personalized tents sat out there, shabby places where the owners clearly slept. The place reeked of the weed that was being passed around from local to local in the strongest spliffs I have ever toked!
So we were told that this "Musicians club" got into the swing about 7:30pm and that if we wanted our buds, best to come back then. We hung around, digging the vibe of the place and the strange very Australian stoner folk rock one man and his guitar music they were playing.
After about half an hour our stomachs called us back out to streetlit Nimbin centre and the one restaurant, we ate there, and then found a hostel that a local stoner recommended to us. Granny's farm it was called. It sat outside town, well into the darkness of Australian night and away from the town. A tiny dirt road with a sign pointed us there, and after heaving over and steering clear of swimming pool sized craters on the tiny road, we pulled up near a lit patio with 5 or 6 people milling around happily, shooting the breeze.
When we arrived we were greeted by the hostel owner who was drinking wine with his mother (Presumably Granny) in front of an unsmoked spliff and there was a taste of weed in the air.
He gave us a double room key, we were happy with it; we left again with the car.
I drove the maybe 800 feet into town, as it was so dark we couldn’t safely traverse the terrain on foot. I parked in front of the bar. We had a quick drink and a game of pool, while we talked to a trackmarked Layne Staley-abee and an aboriginal drainer who kept trying to sell me weed the whole time I was there. They stank like sweat and pain and dirt. Like Middle Australia. We walked back to the tent, and lo and behold, we heard Irish voices outside!
The Navan accents of two lonely guys called us to companionship, like Nimbin called us for the tokes. We smoked a fag outside with them, and it wasn't long before we were tipped-the-nod, led inside and were feasting and rolling on the prodigal weed, talking shite about everything and setting up an Irish corner in the sitting room cum tent cum coffee shop that we had somehow been thrown into together.
A whim of the gods.
We stayed smoking and rolling till the Irish guys left for their beds, then a little longer again till after the guitarist, who had been playing us sweet weedfolk music all night, disappeared somewhere and we were left alone with the owners. So we left and headed back to the hostel. The weed was hydro-organic, grown probably within stones throw of where we were wobbling, stunk to the heavens, and one of the buds, I shit you not, was the size of a tennis ball.
So we ambled shoddy back to the hostel, to drink our wine and rest weary on hard stranger mattresses. The locals with a sort of red-pupiled polite disdain eyed us. I guess, a form of stoner snobbery.
Man, I turned that key on the little double doors of our hostel, and the first thing that struck was the spiders flanking and gaining advantage on us immediately on all sides. There wasn't a wall that wasn't covered in webs. I immediately set to spider slaughter. And that took about half an hour and the walls were still covered in webs.
I chased muscular fuckers, speedy bastards, evil looking multi coloured spider cunts that you would run a mile from Ireland, and I killed them all to the best of my eyesight and ability. Then we set to the bottle of red and smoking so much weed our eyes turned Chianti.
We passed out late, trying to ignore the insect fear, and woke early, immediately rolling a spliff to dispel any more unknown insect fear. That helped.
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