Photo Essay: Mardi Grass Festival in Australia

My friends and I were in Nimbin t volunteer at the Mardi Grass festival which is organized by the Hemp Embassy. Every year, for about 3 days, thousands of people come to this little town to celebrate marijuana and support its legalization. For some, it’s just a good opportunity to freely smoke in the streets really.

It wasn’t hard work to volunteer there. Basically you just had to roll fake joints with plants, paint rubbish in purple and stuff like that. In exchange, the Hemp Embassy gave us food, showers and weed. There are not a lot of places in the world where you get paid in weed…

Nimbin is located in the middle of the mountains. It is really just a main street with stores and coffee shops but everything revolved around marijuana. There was even a museum rooting for marijuana legalization.

There’s a lot of things happening during the day: mainly parades (old VW combi, Ganja Fairies), concerts and funny contest like bang throwing or joint rolling.

To mock the cops, a few volunteers were dress in police uniforms and handing fake joints to tourists so that the local authorities couldn’t tell who was really smoking weed.

After the festival I stayed for a few more weeks with the locals who were just all crazy and extravagant. We mostly spent our days smoking and talking about cannabis. Nimbin is definitely like no other town in the world…

Enjoy the photos!

Willy