(Just arrived at Daisies, hands up means your having more fun, and it was windy.)
Music festivals are irrational places. Having never been to one, Rocking the Daisies (or Daisies for short), a three-day festival near Darling in the Western Cape (South Africa) was quite an introduction. But somehow, Daisies turned out to be more than the sum of 17,000 highly intoxicated music fans on a remote wine farm. Don’t ask me how, it just did.
After our hour long bus ride into the heart of the Western Cape, we turned up the world’s longest red dirt driveway, finally finding ourselves at an infinite parking lot where we joined a line to enter our tent area. After throwing our stuff into our tents and preparing “spiritually” for the festival, we followed the pleasant bumping of the base around the dam, over the bridge, and into the madness.
(Alicia, Courtney, and Hannah dam-side, the beach bar in the back.)
The next several hours were something of a blur. We moved pretty erratically between the shady, dam-side beach bar tent, the main stage, the food area, the electric stage, and various other (apparently less memorable) festival locations. My three very distinct memories from day one were first, listening to a band called Goodluck and absolutely loving them, second, bumping into a tent stake at the beach bar, and third, trying to make myself a sandwich in the pitch dark tent, giving up, and eating a raw tomato, avocado, and bread with only my bare hands. By about 1am, after 8 straight hours of festival fun, I said goodbye to Jack Parrow (an Afrikaans rapper) and turned in.
(Roman and I after breakfast on day 2)
Day 2 started with a lot of wind, a sketchy breakfast, and a horrible pain in my leg. Turns out, when I “bumped into a tent stake at the beach bar”, I actually drop kicked a 3’ wide stake with enough force to draw blood (and as I would only discover 6 weeks later, chip my shin bone). I volunteered to go with Alicia into the general camping area to find Daniel and search for a much needed cappuccino. As we walked through general camping, we passed bathroom lines that were at least 50 people long, lines for food carts that were at least 30 people long, and thousands upon thousands of tents assembled in such a random and disorganized fashion that I couldn’t help but be reminded of a township. The irony was not lost on me.
(A sweet picture of general camping near Daniel’s tent, courtesy of Alicia (a lot of these pictures are hers actually))
We finally tracked down the tiny pup tent that Daniel was sharing with his friend Jean, and we sort of sat around in a stupor in the weeds, talking primarily about how Daniel was pretty certain that someone had drank two of his beers and preceded to move histent two feet forward sometime in the night. We decided it was definitely aliens.
After checking in with Joe for lunch, I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the Savannah Dry Comedy tent (which was a fitting combination of two of my favorite things, stand-up and hard cider). In the evening, we all met up to go together to see the headliners, Alt-J (∆) and The Hives (we got Desmond and the Tutu’s as a bonus). Highlights of the second night included an indie pop rendition of Remix to Ignition (during which Micaela played her whistle), Courtney forcing me to take a few extra moments to really look at how beautiful the sky was, Leo being felt up by a really intoxicated girl (oh the irony!), and Leo and Roman completely dropping a girl who was trying to crowd surf in a raft.
(Hannah, Courtney and Micaela in front of the main stage.)
The unfortunate part of having a great spot for a great show is that everyone had been standing in their spots for hours, which led to, what else, girls peeing in the middle of the crowd. However horrifying and disgusting it was to have a grown woman squat in my personal space and literally (if unintentionally) relieve herself on my shoes, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for us to unanimously agree that, “Hey guess what guys, EVERYONE IS MAD!”
After another very questionable nights sleep on an admittedly very comfortable mattress, we woke up to another windy morning. After breakfast, a visit to the merch tent, and another round of stand up, we headed back, packed our things, and piled into the van, all in various stages of complete hot mess-osity. 
(Morning of the last day, chilling by the main stage, probably sitting in human fecal matter.)
Driving back to campus, I tried to decided how I felt about the whole thing. I had learned important lessons I had never expected to learn at a music festival, about endurance (mental, physical, and emotional), about picking your battles and doing what makes you happy even if you have to do it alone, about knowing your limits but being open to (and usually loving) the unexpected.
Something that stuck with me more than expected was the memory of walking through the general camping area, and finding an aggressive avocado stain on the inside of my shirt really drove home what this had meant to me. The fact that people (17,000 people to be exact) not only voluntarily agreed to live in a condition of relative squalor, we paid good money for the experience. Something about alcohol, music, and mass quantities of people is insanely valuable to a new generation of people, and whether we realize it or not, it gives us some insight into how some people in the world live their whole lives. Rocking the Daisy gave me the opportunity to explore and embrace my repressed desire to be completely irrational, to realize my desire to and love of being fully and truly “uncivilized”. For three days, we had exactly three jobs, eat, drink, and enjoy, and I didn’t realize until we were driving away how much other seemingly simple activities (hygiene, social media, grocery shopping) can be really taxing. Rocking the Daisies was a window into a life I have never lived, a life of basic needs and impulses. It was an entirely unique experience and made me very uncomfortable at times, but in the end, it made me believe whole heartedly in a quote I once heard from a certain Mackenzie I know (though I don’t think she wrote it):
“Every experience is either a good time or a good story.”
Butt Naked Travels 