…Once you got over the eye watering smell of unwashed stock broker and dirty carpet, you noticed the way the place looked. There was stuff all over the floor. Garbage, clothing, full ash trays, half full bottles. The couches had numerous large stains and were splattered with damp looking piles of what turned out to be dog vomit…

I heard about it from a bloke who gave me a ride near Budgewoi, on the New South Wales Central Coast.
“You look like a bit of a hippy type” he says. “You’d probably like Rainbow”.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Rainbow Gathering” he declaimed, making air quotes with raised eyebrows. “It’s like a big get together of alternative-lifestylers, and weirdos ‘n that. My girlfriend used to go back in the day. She loved it. They go off in the bush and live in teepees for weeks, sit around and smoke pot and talk about peace and shit”.
“Sounds interesting” I said.

So I got on-line at a café, and tried to find out about it. I could only find very sketchy info. Nothing said where it would be held, but there were some dates, and a posting that said “somewhere in the Victorian high country…” The thing was supposed to start in about a fortnight, so I packed up my camp, and hitched south.
I got to Melbourne a few days later, and rode the train to Flinders St.
‘Now what’ thought I…

Waiting at a corner to cross, a handsome black man, wearing an expensive looking suit, stopped beside me.
“Hello..”
He was obviously slightly drunk. I could smell bourbon on his breath, and he had that relaxed stance of the serious drinker.
“Hi” I said and smiled.
“Buy you breakfast?” he drawled, in the over-pronounced manner of the intoxicated.
“OK, sure” I said.
I was hungry.

We walked about a block to the foyer of a very plush high rise hotel, and my host ushered me into the lift and we rode to the buffet floor. To the disapprobation of the waiters, we settled ourselves at an immaculately set table. I propped my backpack in the corner as discreetly as I could, and tried not to be too smelly. My companions breath was doing a pretty good job of disguising my B.O., I thought.
“It’s a buffet so just help yourself” he said.
We loaded up our plates with fresh fruit and pastry.
“No bacon” said my host. “I’m a Muslim”.
We returned to the table.
“I’m Jason” he announced.
“Emmanuel” I replied.  
We shook hands and commenced eating.

The food was beautiful and delicious. We had several cups of coffee and talked about ourselves. Jason was a stock trader for a large firm. He had lived in Australia only 6 years, having come over from the States.  He was curious about my travels, and I told him about my mission to find Rainbow.
“Jesus” he said, wrinkling his nose with distaste, “it sounds awful. I can’t imagine anything worse than sitting around in the dirt for weeks, surrounded by smelly hippies. Why don’t you spend a few weeks in Melbourne instead. This city is fantastic, and the clubs are awesome. I go clubbing three nights a week and I never get sick of it, because there are so many and they keep changing the wallpaper!”

After we’d finished eating, Jason paid our bill (the most expensive breakfast I’ve ever eaten) with his card and we floated down in the lift.
“There’s nothing like good coffee for a hangover. Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee” Jason urged.
We sat at an open air table on the footpath outside some kind of civic centre or museum. We ordered coffees, and Jason continued to try and persuade me to stay in Melbourne. 
“You can stay at my place” he said emphatically, leaning close to grip my arm, and breathing a mix of croissant and malt liquor into my nostrils. “I have guests all the time”.
Two tables away there was a girl watching us. She was in her early twenties, with dreadlocks and a backpack sitting beside her. We smiled at each other.
“Do you want to sit with us?” I asked her, feeling the need of some female company.
The girl came over and sat down, plonking her bag beside mine. I introduced myself, and Jason, and she shook hands with us and told us her name was Annalee, and she was a New-Zealander. She had just arrived in Australia, at Melbourne airport, the night before. She had spent the night camped in a park. I congratulated her on her thriftiness, and we chatted for a minute about our favorite ways to avoid detection by council workers when sleeping rough.
“If you want a place to stay tonight” I told her, “Jason here has a sweet pad in town, and he’s a very generous host. Maybe if you ask him nicely he’ll let us both stay at his place tonight?”
Jason made a face for a moment, but graciously extended the invitation and we all set off to find his car, which was in a mysterious location somewhere in the region of the club district.
As we walked, I asked Annalee where she was headed after Melbourne.
“Well” she said, “I’m not sure. I’m going to a thing called Rainbow Gathering, but I don’t know exactly where it is…”

Once we found his car – a very shiny late model Mercedes coupé – the ride to Jason’s house was pretty quick. Annalee and I talked about Rainbow the whole way, and Jason did his best to hide his aggravation at being made the third wheel. The coincidence of our meeting was irresistibly cosmic, so, being hippies, we naturally interpreted it as divine intervention. It was a pretty astronomic coincidence. Some of her friends had been to gatherings in the past, and she reckoned only a few dozen people usually attended the Australian ones, so the odds of two of them finding themselves at adjoining tables in a café were pretty impressive.
Once we got to Jason’s we were brought back to earth from our cosmic mood. Walking in the front door, one was struck first, by the stench. Once you got over the eye watering smell of unwashed stock broker and dirty carpet, you noticed the way the place looked. There was stuff all over the floor. Garbage, clothing, full ash trays, half full bottles. The couches had numerous large stains and were splattered with damp looking piles of what turned out to be dog vomit. (Jason had two long haired terriers, with dreadlocks almost as impressive as Annalee’s).

We sat down on the clearest patches of floor we could find, Jason poured us stiff drinks, and we tried not to stare at the dog vomit. Jason told us to make ourselves at home and stay as long as we liked. Then he shuffled off to the bedroom with the bottle of whisky and started to snore.
Annalee and I decided that it would be rudeness of the highest order to just abandon ship. She had a slip of paper with the number and address of one of the Rainbow organisers on it, and she was hoping to meet them the following night, to get a lift with them to the as-yet-undecided festival site. Apparently, the plan was that the organisers would jump in their van with the tepee on the roof, and drive off into the Victorian high country until they found a suitable spot, at which point they would call someone else, who would then announce the location on the web forum. If we met up with them, we would get on board with the festival from the start, and get a ride to the site to boot. It seemed like a good plan to stick it out at Jason’s for the night, then locate the convoy the following day.
Jason’s fridge was full of neatly stacked groceries in home delivery bags, so our food needs were taken care of. The kitchen was in an unusable condition though. There were dead cockroaches on every horizontal surface that wasn’t actually covered in rubbish, and live cockroaches on every vertical surface. We decided to do our host a good turn, and we set about cleaning the joint up. We cleared all the rubbish out of the kitchen, emptied all thirteen ash trays throughout the house, scrubbed the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom, put the dogs out in the yard and sprayed Jif all over everything until the place smelled like a hospital. Neither of us ventured into Jason’s bedroom. We didn’t want to disturb him (or find out just how rank his bedroom actually was).

We made some pizzas for dinner, and Jason shuffled out of his room rubbing his eyes just as we were getting them out of the oven. When he saw the pizza he looked green. When he saw the house, he cried. Not a noisy cry, just a lot of hot tears running down his face.
“Thank you, you guys” he said, and hugged us both.

Jason declined pizza, but poured us all big glasses of top shelf whiskey. We sat on the floor eating, and he got out a cigarette carton full of photos. Most of them were of a tall black woman with strikingly beautiful features, and primly coiffed, straightened hair.
“That’s my mother” Jason told us proudly. “The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She died 10 years ago. I left Chicago when she died. I just couldn’t stand the family any more. She was the only one who accepted me. I wore her second favourite dress to her funeral. She was buried in the best one, but I still looked fabulous. Not one single member of my family has spoken to me since that day.”
We had several more rounds of whiskey, and Jason passed out around eleven, with a picture of his mum in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. We butted out his smoke in one of the thirteen clean ashtrays on the coffee table and put a blanket over him. Annalee and I rolled out our sleeping bags on the floor next to our host.

The next morning, while Jason still snored, we rolled our sleeping bags up again, and set out to find Rainbow.

(Below: I’m not a hippy, I just like tents. Top photo: me at Rainbow Gathering. I got there in the end. Read about my Rainbow experiences here.)

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>> Possum hunting, skinny dipping and playing the blues; read about Rainbow Gathering 2014 in Tasmania.

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Manny here, the guy who makes this blog.

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