Michelle's chickpeas: Festival Fun

Last weekend we took the day off school and work and headed out bush to a trance festival. We had been looking forward to it for a long time, we got our tickets before Christmas as we saw it advertised, it was our kind of festival - not commercial, local and cheap. So very excited on Friday morning we woke up to realise that the forecast of 4 days of rain had come true :(

We packed up and headed inland through flooded roads and serious rain, we almost turned back and had all lost enthusiasm, but we carried on.
When you head inland from where we live you hit a mountain range, the roads go up and around and through the mountains and then down the other side. The rain at the top of the range was incredible, then as we followed the road down the other side the rain started to ease and by the time we got to the site the rain had pretty much stopped. So we set up, had some lunch, the boys made friends straight away, then we headed over the camping area into the main festival site.

The actual site was quite small, it probably took 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other if you just walked, but there was so much to look at it actually took much longer. The kids area, was a great bamboo geodesic dome, full of arts and craft materials and a fun filled program of workshops for the whole weekend. There were a couple more domes with a weekend of workshops and talks planned. They had put a lot of attention into the visual side of the festival and there were UV art installations all over the site, there was a spinning buddah wearing sunglasses, a UV water fountain, a giant remote controlled smoke breathing butterfly and amongst other things over sized toadstools. The boys loved these things, especially the toadstools and the butterfly.
There were stalls selling food from all around the world, clothes stalls and a juggling stall which had a basket of devil sticks, juggling balls, poi's and hula hoops to play with.

There were 2 stages, the pyramid stage and earth pod. The pyramid stage started up in the evening and did not stop, the bass was booming and could be heard across the whole site. It was only electronic music on this stage, apart from a few performances on the Saturday night. They had an official opening ceremony from a group of local aboriginal people playing the didgeredoo and dancing, which was really great to see - important for the boys to see too. We also watched a fire show which was pretty awesome, some crazy fire twirling and swirling. Even a ninja guy doing a kind of kung fuey dance with a sword on fire - needless to say, the boys LOVED this!

The whole weekend was great, everyone had an awesome time. Tris and I got to have a good dance, Rowan loved the workshops and Reuben loved the playdough and painting.
The kids workshops were great, Rowan did yoga, coconut leaf weaving and they both joined in an amazing workshop called sonic stomp. It was run by a home ed family who make electronic music and have devised this workshop to help kids understand music and the different frequencies. They played the bass part of a tune and got the kids doing a stomping kind of dance, then got them to do a dance for the mid range part of the tune and then a crazy dance for the treble. then they played a tune and got the kids to do their chosen dances to each bit of the tune, listening out for when the frequency changed, which ended in all 3 frequencies and lots of crazy jumping around. They also got to have a go on a microphone which turned their voices into a robot voice and a couple of other electronic noisy things. They loved it.
On the last night they had a UV kids disco, complete with UV body paint for them to decorate themselves.

The only downside of the weekend was Reuben saw a dwarf man and thought he was the scariest thing ever. Tris later met this man and thought it would be a good idea to introduce them - it wasn't, Reuben ran away screaming in fear, oops. I didn't know what to say really, but we both felt really bad for the man, he was really friendly too.

On the whole though the weekend was great, we all felt refreshed (albeit knackered too!) and it was really nice to spend a long weekend together. It did start to rain on Monday but not too much, that is until we crossed that range again and it was still pounding down, in fact it had not stopped all weekend. It is crazy how different the weather can be in such a small area.

Anyway here are the photos from the weekend, the camera ran out of battery half way through, so we only have photos up till Saturday night.............