"All you need is that perfect song on a perfect drive to feel infinite!"
About a week ago, met Matt from
Adelaide and Sarah from France in a suburb of Sydney called Glenfield.
Matt drives a light-blue kombi! Imagine our excitement when we found
this out. One of the goals for Australia was to have a roadtrip with a hippie van. Can't get a cooler ride than that!! Started our drive
towards Byron bay. Ca 800 km to go. Stopped in little towns along the
way and made it to Nambucca Heads by the evening. Were hopelessly
confused about what we want to eat but ended up cooking some tasty
chicken with rice. Matt has all the kitchen equipment you would think of in secret hideaways in kombi. As we thought Bluesfest has strict security and
every alcohol will be confiscated at the gate of the area, as camp-site
doesn't have the license, we decided to have a small pre-party. Ended
up having a bit too much fun, swimming in the river and pissing off
all our neighbor-tents. I collected around 26 mosquito-bites from
that night.
Keiu, Sarah, Matt and me and the kombi!
If we run out of money we are ready for busking with a sign "need guitar lessons" or "ukulele lessons" in this case.
Continued our drive the next day and made it to Byron by
night. What a lovely hippie-city, despite the councils hard work to
make it backbacker-unfriendly. There is basically no wifi available,
quite expensive acommodation and they don't allow goons in bigger
than 2-litre packages. Drove to the festival area and were ready for
it all to start the next day! Our first shift as volunteers was
12.30pm the next day. Festival hadn't even begun yet, the gates for
the public were 3pm, so there was a lot of chilling for the first
couple of hours. Once got to work we spent the first day at the
water-station, the next 4 days in different bars, three times of them
in a vip-bar. Saw some celebrities, probably a lot more than we
acknowledge, just didn't recognize them. The people in the vip can be
divided into two: really lovely life-loving, still-young-at-heart
people, or, obnoxious I-have-too-much-money folks who treat you as
help and think it's a great idea to call you a “rubbish-girl”.
Was definitely interesting. The bar managers and staff were super
nice and one of the vip-bars had the best location. Between main
stage “Mojo” and a second-biggest “Crossroads”, so even while
working we caught a lot of awesome bands. Truly, we did get the
best roster!!! (As we were group 1 of the Green (bar) groups,
and number 1 leaders were the ones to make the schedule for the teams, we had an extra-awesome team leader Evan who also agreed
that music and fun is the priority!) We got to see all our favorites
(and so much more!) with an exception of John Butler. Bluesfest had
an amazing line-up. Huge variety of diferent artists. More than 200.The bigger
problem than being at work was what to choose while not working,
often we were running between stages.
Volunteering next to getting us a free
pass, cheap coffee and some souvenirs, gave a great experience, a
chance to meet more awesome people and an opportunity to not
waste all your money at the daytime when you'd be free to eat and
drink everything non-stop as all the food places were amazing! Lagos pizza, the
famous organic donuts... mouth-watering.. So blessed and
happy to have had that opportunity!
Grace Potter and The Nocturnals. She has so much power!!
Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros! I didn't expect that from them, one of the favorites. They got the crowd singing and dancing so so easily.
John Mayer - I love his songs a lot, but his set I only liked and didn't love. Got so so much more passion and emotion out of so many other performers, he just didn't give me THAT feeling.
The Beards!! I could listen to them every day and would still have as much fun. They only sing about beards and give a great show!
Mr. Jack Johnson! Have been wanting to see him for ages. Amazing gig!
Rockwiz! An Aussie tv-quiz-series focused on rock music. They had special shows at Bluesfest. Saw pretty great talents.
Playing for Change! A group of performers from different continents with a goal to inspire, connect and bring peace to the world through music.
Soulful Morcheeba!
Michael David Rosenberg aka Passenger! One of my absolute favourite artists. Loved every second of the set. Been dying to see him live, so you can imagine how happy and excited I was. It's rare when a concert makes me cry, and this did! Got to chat with him for a bit after the show and my cd signed. I felt like I'm thirteen, forgetting english and stumbling on words.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BLUESFEST!!!! 25!!!!
Erykah Badu. She is great in live, but what we heard from backstage gossips (as volunteers we were often befind the stage and in vip areas), she is a huge diva. The concert was 20 minutes late, and Bluesfest had excellent timing usually!! Apparently she didn't like something in the organisation and refused to get out of the car before the problem was sorted out.
Michael Franti and The Spearheads. He knows how to get the party started! So much positive, feel-good music, couldn't stop smiling or dancing!
Kim Churchill! He plays 4 instruments and sings at the same time! Awesomely talented, chillax dude.
Devendra Banhart!
Dave Matthews Band! Closed Bluesfest 2014 with a 2.5 hour set.
Had a chat with an Aussie guy, born in
Sweden and having Hungarian ancestors, finally found proof that
Estonian and Hungarian actually are similar. Cute word for a dog in
Estonian would be “kutsu”. He understood that and pronounced it
pretty similarly! We got overly excited.
You know what's the best alarm clock,
when you're camping? Sun! Every morning at 7.30 am you are up up and
awake, sweaty and don't have enough air. The nights in tent are a bit
too cold and mornings a bit too hot but in general can't complain, it's sunny and hot every day. Summer is back! After
Sydney's crap weather I appreciate it so much more!
After Bluesfest we had absolutely zero
idea what to do next. Luckily Matt was about as undecided as we and
we decided to rejoin our forces and camp together for a couple of
nights. Discovered Byron and it's awesome this time
backbacker-friendly bar “Cheeky Monkeys”.
Theme nights every
night, a chance to win great prizes like surfing lessons, skydives or island trips by participating in social games, and 5$ dinners and drink specials. As we are still in desperate
need of some cash coming in we broke our promise and accepted another
farm work. Gonna be planting garlic for the next week 150 km
from Byron in the middle of nowhere. Oh these good-old wake up early,
do your work and whine about it for hours later days. Hopefully will
meet fun people and get a lot of free garlic.
Hi, I'm a fat mermaid!
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