Just before we went to Adelaide, we bought a tent, a mattress and a blow-up pump. We thought it might be fun to do some nights camping out - really. However we forgot take a sleeping bag or something to cover ourselves with and so never ended up doing it. So 2 weeks ago we bought some nice compact sleeping bags - you have to be economic with space in a mini. All we needed now was to decide where to go and we would be set.
So on Thursday night we were out for drinks for Annette's birthday and I saw Danny who said he was going to Confest - a hippie festival that runs twice a year, once for the Easter break and then again in Summer. 'Why don't you come up too?' he told us. Well here was a chance to use all our new camping gear and I thought a hippie festival could be interesting.
So we went. Now think of all the stereotypes you can imagine about a hippie festival and then multiply it by 3 and you might get close to what we experienced. Interesting to say the least.
Then went about to look for Danny and Simon, the only people we really knew up there. We went to the info tent to see if Danny might have left a note there to say were they were camped out since there was no network signals at all. There was a board full of hand written notes and messages and I looked for the crappiest piece of torn paper with some message scribbled on it. I thought that if Danny had left a message that it would be some really poor effort - if he bothered at all.
Then we kept walking around, it was getting dark but there was a full moon and it really did light up the sky so much so that it made it easy to see. Then suddenly we came across a big painted sign saying 'Anita, we are here'. Did Danny go to some art session in the afternoon and discover another side to him? I was baffled. We called out his name but no-one answered. We set up our tent there anyway and carried on walking around. I heard some Jazz music and we went over and found Danny doing some improvised jamming with some other musician types. So we found out where Danny and Simon were camping - it wasn't near us - we were however next to another Anita - Danny didn't make that sign nor did he write any note for that matter.
The next day we stumbled across an interesting workshop about the benefits of certain foods. A strange thing about a lot of the hippies at the festival was that they could have some very interesting information but then they screw it up by throwing in all these conspiracy theories or just plain nonsense. For example the guy running this workshop was telling us how Steve McQueen had tried some alternative treatment - the treatment itself sounded plausible - in fact it was based on something that I was already looking seriously at doing myself. But then he said 'They' ('They' were usually the Government, Pharmaceutical companies, or just some unspecified 'Them') poisoned him because he was going to tell the truth about cancer. He also said that Moses was a gold smith, and the word 'worship' actually comes from 'workshop' because Moses had a workshop. Out of the very many things wrong with that single statement was also the fact that they didn't speak English back then. Anyway everyone around smiled and nodded as though he was saying something intelligent. Coincidently when I got back, I googled about how Steve McQueen died and it was from Mesothelioma.
That evening I bumped into another person I knew. He and his friend asked if I was enjoying myself and would I come again. I said yes to enjoying but also that I probably might not come again. They told me that it can be confronting at first but I will get used to it. It is true that I do have a lot of inhibitions like I couldn't cover my naked body in mud and jump around screaming like a (vegan) cave man with the hope of reconnecting to something primal in me. I have this cynical side of me telling me this is nonsense. In fact there was very little I could do there because I was held back by my cynicism. We didn't go to the tree-hugging workshop either but my hippie experience was enhanced because I did end up have an outdoor shower using a hose as there was no other options. What I did notice though was that not having that cynicism does make you susceptible to believe a lot of the idiotic conspiracy theories that come your way.
We ended up leaving on Monday night. There was a storm coming and we had already experienced one storm which thankfully only lasted just over an hour. We sat in a large tent with a whole lot of people waiting for it to pass while a whole bunch of mud-people were jumping and screaming all around us. I wish I had a tape recorder because some of the conversations around us were quite remarkable. For example these two guys sitting next to me were talking. One guy said that Germans created the universe and then the other guy said that he was starting to read about nano-technology to which the first guy said 'Oh right you mean like the ipod-nano'.
Anyway I did really enjoy Monday. I was starting to think that I could do it again some time. But I am glad that I did it at least once.
Photos starting from the left:
Me in one of the big tents,
Patrick standing in the rain,
The sign that someone wrote,
The big tent we sat in during the rain storm,
The mud-people
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