Surfers Paradise, Nimbin and Byron Bay

From Brisbane we headed south to Surfers Paradise where we spent the morning hanging out on the beach. After a quick bite to eat in the Surf Club we hit the road again and drove to the hippy hangout of Nimbin. This is a town in the middle of nowhere that has become home to a collection of stoned hippies. Unfortunately most of the locals were too high to turn up to work on the day that we visited, so most of the points of interest were closed. We did however visit the Hemp Museum where they extolled the virtues of hemp, and were fighting a slow and unsuccessful battle to legalise marijuana in Australia. We couldn’t help but notice that most of the locals seemed a little bit troubled (mentally) and paranoid, so paradoxically they we’re probably providing a reasonably good case for ensuring that the drug remains illegal in Australia. After Nimbin we drove back towards the coast and stopped briefly in Byron Bay to take some photos of their lighthouse at sunset, before starting on the first leg of our long drive down to Hunter Valley. To break up the long drive we spent the night in the The Abbey Motel in Grafton. The next day we stopped off in Port Macquarie for a wander around the harbour and bit of shopping, before eventually arriving in at our YHA in Cessnock (the main town in South Hunter Valley).