As summer inches steadily closer, many of us are looking forward to the obligatory student weekend away – festivals. There are now more choices than ever when it comes to picking your perfect festival, from the guaranteed big names of Glastonbury to the outdoor clubbing experience that is Creamfields, with everything else in between. With the UK holding host to a huge number of festivals, it’s easy to forget that there are hundreds more all over Europe. Fortunately, Vision is here to show you all the wonders that festivaling abroad has to offer…
Exit Festival, Serbia
I arrived in Budapest at midnight (flights were £80, or you can fly to Belgrade) with two friends. A day before it began I got a bus straight to Exit festival and arrived at six in the morning. On arriving, we set up our tent at the nearest available spot and left it there. This was the biggest mistake of our trip. The best piece of advice I can give is to pitch your tent under as much shade as possible, since summer temperatures in Serbia regularly reach 40 degrees. I can guarantee that it is not good for a hangover when your tent feels like a sauna and all your water tastes like somebody has urinated in it. The actual campsite is just a big field about 15-20 minutes downhill (about 30-40 minutes back) walk from the actual festival arena.
On the first day we explored Novi Sad. It’s a very ugly city – about as attractive as Ann Widdecombe on a bad day – it’s almost a shame they rebuilt the bits NATO blew up in the ’90s. It’s only really worth a visit so you can claim that you’ve seen a little of Serbia. Don’t bother with the local food, it tastes like baby sick.
The crowd in the campsite was mainly British with a lot of Dutch and Germans and there was generally a cool and very friendly atmosphere. There are also a few small stages with DJs scattered about that are good for a bit of day-time entertainment. The food on the campsite was limited but satisfactory, and infinitely cheaper than the £8 burgers on offer in the UK. It is also the most luxurious festival campsite I’ve ever visited, with portacabins that are cleaned out every day and showers that, even at peak times, require a ten minute wait at most; it really is five star compared to Reading/Leeds.
But what Exit festival is really about is the music arena. All of the stages are housed within a 17th century fortress situated on a hill 40 meters above the river Danube. It is an unbeatable location for a festival. Once the music gets going at around 7pm, the atmosphere more than matches the location, as about 80,000 people – around half of them Serbian – flood the fortress, turning it into an enormous maze-like club. No festival or concert experience I have ever had has beaten watching David Guetta play as the sun came up with 40,000 people going crazy in a valley created by the fortress’s moat, with a back-drop of imposing 30 metre walls.
With 24 stages there is a wide enough variety of music to match any taste, with everything from chilled reggae to trance. However, if your only interest is music, Exit festival is probably not for you, as there are bigger and better line-ups in the UK. While there are great acts, like DJ Shadow, LCD Soundsystem and Pendulum, these are mixed in with less standard festival acts such as Mika and Missy Elliot, as well as a lot of smaller European bands that British festival-goers are unlikely to be familiar with. However if you are looking for a more exciting festival experience this summer, Exit has to be on your list, as its atmosphere is unbeatable. With cheaper tickets (£125 including camping) and lower living costs it does not work out as much more expensive than going to a UK festival.
Outlook Festival, Croatia
Imagine this: a clear blue sea dancing and teasing the shore of a far-flung foreign land; abandoned forts, complete with crumbling stone and dank dungeons and bikini-clad women gyrating on the sandy coast to the distant sounds of music. Quite perfect really. Yet while this sounds very lovely, it appears rather intangible; somewhere between the frustrated visualizations of a teenage boy and the plot line of another Tomb Raider sequel. Yet this is the reality promised to travelers when they reach Outlook Festival in Pula, an area of outstanding beauty, on the north-west Croatian coast. A reality that I, in September, like many others, will be embracing.
As well as the line-up, which reads like the family tree of dubstep, dub, reggae and grime, Outlook offers festival-goers a chance to escape the pitfalls of festival-going in the United Kingdom. While hardcore fans revel in having to use a boat to get to the main stage at Glastonbury because it has rained so much over the past few days, most of us prefer to watch our favourite artists without wearing life-jackets due to fear of drowning. Boats will be used at Outlook but they are fortunately reserved for offshore boat parties, headed by various musical legends, rather than transportation from your sodden tent, via sodden grass, to an even more sodden and muddy stage.
Some of the appeal of this festival is in the distance one has to travel to get there. At the start of your journey, in a cloudy area of England, Outlook can be a visceral and abstract dream; a place of soft light and sultry sound, pulling you towards it with some unknown gravitational force. If you’re less sentimental about these things, it can be the hard-earned reward after traveling more than a thousand miles. It certainly feels more impressive than a two-hour Megabus journey to Reading festival.
The travel in itself can be enjoyable, if not expensive. Pre-emptive discussions of road trips across Europe – seeing the Swiss Alps; eating and drinking our way through cheese and wine in France and rolling up in style – are probably just romantic pipe-dreams. Yet the excitement this far in advance is something of a novelty and is pulling my group of friends through York’s exam season.
The real beauty of Outlook is that it combines holiday and festival in one beautiful conglomerate of sub-bass and sand. Selling out already only goes to show the strength and the appeal of such a young festival. For such an expensive purchase, and the far journey it encompasses; looking forward to Outlook has become my number one hobby.