Back on Queensland soil

Today's map.

It was nearly lunchtime after I'd dealt with the snapped clutch lever, so I was back on the bike straight away, heading for a less crashy place to eat. That place, after a couple of dozen miles of beautiful scenery, was Nimbin.

Nimbin is a freakin' hole.

Be careful asking for a pot at the Nimbin Hotel.

A faded sign, just out of town, boasts that Nimbin was home to the 1973 Aquarius Festival. Almost nothing, it seems, has changed in the town since then. The people in the main street - stoners, hippies (overwhelmingly unemployed), the mentally ill, wandering children and dogs - look as lost and faded as the festival billboard itself. Cannabis passes for culture here; a shallow, smoky and dismal shared futility. The only clean buildings are the police station and the drug abuse outreach centre. Everything else is a confused pastiche of New Age symbology, folk art and simple filth.

In deference to what good there was in town - the alternative power company, working artists and genuine seekers of truth - I ordered a tofu burger for lunch. It was surprisingly good, making a mockery of my own flaccid and tasteless attempts to cook with the stuff.

Tofu done right.

I filled my prescription at the local chemist (yes folks, I bought drugs in Nimbin) and went to leave, but my bike was parked in by a delivery truck. I wandered around some more and talked to three people. One of them asked me for money. The second offered me weed. The third told me the times the police sniffer dogs come by and offered to help me hide my stash. I explained I wasn't carrying and he went on a rant about police suppressing freedom anyway. By then, the truck had moved and I was free to get the hell out of there.

The next hour or so was spent pottering north through the pretty countryside and crossing the border into Queensland. The road surfaces improved immediately, so I enjoyed gently swooping through smooth corners as I came out of the hills behind the Gold Coast. In planning to arrive at Nick's place that afternoon, my brain had conveniently neglected to consider traffic once I was back on the highway. The five 'o' clock rush was in full swing, so the eight lanes of the Pacific Motorway had become 110km/h destruction derby. Nearing Brisvegas, this rapidly became an 80km/h event, then 30km/h, then a going-nowhere-and-overheating contest.

Unprepared for the gridlock, my bladder began to fill with great rivers of impending urine. With my waterworks expanding like the universe after the Big Bang, my mission in life very quickly became finding a way to wee. Simply flopping out my junk and blasting away in public seemed a touch rude, but the crawling cars almost made it a necessity until, shining over the treetops, an beacon of hope shone forth in yellow and blue.

It was IKEA.

I raced in, disobeying all the carpark speed limits along the way. With relief so close, my pee tank issued its warnings of imminent rupture even more frantically.  I spoke to it internally, reassuring it that the time was almost at hand, if it would just hold out a little longer.

How cruel reality can be when judging the nature of a decision, though. Inside the store - one of the largest in the southern hemisphere - I became lost. There were hectares of bathroom fittings, but not a single plumbed loo in sight. Toilet roll holders mocked me as I searched, weeping, with my fingers still in my ears after being assaulted by a display of miniature fountains. For nearly ten minutes I wandered in circles, ready to go in a reasonably capacious vase if I managed to find one, before I found it: a single staff toilet under a small black and white sign. I unloaded with such force that I swear I bent the urinal.

IPeeAhh.

Apart from getting lost in the dark because, as usual, I had only the vaguest idea where my brother lived, I made it to his place without further bodily crises. I was grateful for his and girlfriend Eb's warm welcome, not to mention his fusion cooking prowess in making pizzas out of spaghetti mince. We chatted and watched the wrongest and most hilarious movie ever, then I sank into the most beautiful bed in all of bedly creation. Happy times.