Earthcore 2006

So, yet another Earthcore came and went. This year though, I didn't actually end up even staying for the main night.

Things started out badly pretty much right from the beginning. The weekend proved that no matter how much planning you do, it's never enough and you're kidding yourself if you think it is.

We left around 3pm Friday. The plan was to get there "earlybird", and stay through till Monday and then go home. Plans very quickly fell apart once we actually got onto the final roads that lead to the Undera site.

Apparently there was, amongst other things, a brush fire after we got there and had to queue... of course, I only learnt of this after the whole event -- would have been nice for the guy to tell us that, instead of telling us to hide our alcohol because they were searching cars for it (which was the other reason for the 2+ hour delay in even getting INTO the event.)

So we finally got in, around 8pm... and of course lost the daylight, so we ended up in quite possibly the shittiest camping spot that could have been picked -- mainly due to the fact that the organisers had roped off the area I used last year, and that was quite possibly the best area of the whole Undera site. Key point: trees! Wonderful, shadeful, cooling treeeeeeeeeeeeeees....

We setup camp, and settled into some nice bottles of wine and went on a few missions to check out some of the stages that were already rocken. Had a great night, got moderately drunk and I even (finally says Robyn) had a boogie at the Hydra stage... psy trance and goa always gets me moving.

That's when we discovered, later in the night, that the spot we'd chosen was even more evil than we first thought -- oh joy of joys, we are surrounded by youngen PHD weenies, making all fucken manner of racket and basically being annoying. Here's where I crap on about traditions and shit like that... don't these fuckheads know Friday night is meant to be all casual and relaxing?!? Noooo, they wanna load up on fuck knows what and be dickwads all night.

So anyhow, we wake up early, with very limited sleep, feeling like shit. As the day progresses, it just gets hotter, and dryer, and hotter still. Even Robyn couldn't handle the heat and she usually loves it. I thought I was gonna collapse at one point, even with excellent shade from our canopy thing. We tried the river and it was nice, but packed, and as soon as you leave it, you're hot again.

Seeing the police in full force, and using a sniffer dog, was an excellent touch; one of the last few nails in the coffin for me actually. One has to wonder what the fuck has happened to Earthcores when there are not only cops there, but they're hanging around the water tanker like scumbag cunts looking to bust people.

Harm minimisation 0, state government and police force brownie political points, 1.

We eventually stayed down at the river for most of the arvo, and decided that we were not going to leave on Monday as originally thought, because we'd just be feeling way to seedy and fucked. Come around 10pm, we decided to leave there and then -- the original plan was to leave around 4-5am on Sunday, but we were just wasted from that hot day. After a looooooooong drive home, we finally got cooler and felt half ok.

So that was the amazing Earthcore for this year -- pretty poor. It's funny how chain reactions can fuck a whole weekend up -- if there weren't such long fucken delays in getting IN, we'd have gotten a better spot, and things would have been quite different. Ah well, gotta protect those alcohol prices on the inside of the event eh...

Shit has changed... big pity. There was talk of this being the last Earthcore, but then Spiro quickly changed his mind after receiving ridicule over it all; apparently from now on their events are going more "underneath the radar". That'd suit me perfectly fine.

Check out my photos here.