“Let’s all have a party”
So I left you as I’d arrived in Byron Bay for the Christmas week. The Bay is a little town, with a few streets of smart shops, cafe’s, bars and restaurants for the “beautful people”. They also let the riff raff in, and we’re catered for by such salubrious venues as Cheeky Monkeys. If you’ve been, you’ll know; for the others, anyone who went to the Raz in Liverpool will recognise the same sticky floors and dancing on any raised object, tables, chairs…. Throw in the resident hippy population and it was quite an interesting place!
Before the Christmas day celebrations, we took a day trip up to Nimbin with Jim’s tours. A dying dairy town, there was an attempt to rejuvenate it some decades ago by encouraging people to go back to work the land. This kind of worked, but now it is predominately known as an area for “alternative lifestyles” with some interesting characters living in the surrounding forests. There’s a small main street containing such cultural gems as the Museum (grafitied VW vans) and the Hemp Embassy which seems to be celebrating the New South Wales’ police force turn-a-blind-eye-to-what-they-smoke-in-their-pipes. Although when we walked past, there was a man with his fat dog waving a big flag outside, and that was about it.
More interestingly, was a visit to Jim’s mate Paul who has acquired a big chunk of forest and is trying to recreate all of the worlds trees and flowers, all at once in the same place. This was a true flower power guy, and he did kind of make some sense. Kind of.
“Culture” over, the rest of the time was spent being disappointed with the weather. We managed a little bit of sun, half a sunny day on Christmas and not much else in between. That’s karma, for mentioning good weather too often this past year. Still it was considerably warmer than at home!
On the big day itself, I started with a bacon sarnie and a mango under a palm tree, followed by a walk on the beach. Becuase I could. The place we stayed had a big party- barbequed animals (a whole sheep on one fire) to eat, followed by some slightly depressing guy singing live and refusing to sing any Slade or Wizard (guess who asked) and ended by a big bonfire on the beach. As the Swedish and Germans had their Christmas on the 24th, and shared ours on the real day, the Brits had a Boxing Day party how many times did we have to explain what it meant)- rather unfairly dubbed the “drink yourself English party”.
To try and make up for the festive excesses a few of us walked up to Cape Byron, Australia’s most easterly point. The walk was long, but the views from the top quite nice. Still, with the grey skies it could have been Cornwall!
So compared to a traditional Christmas? Certainly different and a lot of fun. It was good to be away from the commercialism we’d have had back home, since September, too!
Christmas season over, and with most of us heading down south for New Year it was time to move on. A week in one place was a rare luxury in Oz, and I made my final journey down to Sydney to end my love-hate relationship with the Greyhound (love= they got me round half the country quite cheaply; hate= 11,000km by coach isn’t that pleasant!)
Tags: Travel
Nick