I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but where do you go on holiday when your in the adventure tourist business and in theory live in Paradise? A packaged holiday to Spain? Trek to Nepal? Na – we wanted a holiday. We’ve been travelling for 8 years and have seen the sites, so we decided on a festival in Hungry that would be a completely new experience. I used to go to Stonehenge every year, Penny went to Badminton horse trials. Ozora would possibly be a walk down memory lane for me and something totally new for Penny.
I showed Penny the video of the festival
“What do you think?” I said.
“Yeah, why not, we have the camper after all.”
The idea of having the hippy bus was to get us around, not to BE hippys, but what the hell. For a week anyway, we could forget about building houses, www.workingtraveller.com and the day job with www.pappics.co.uk.
12 hours of driving later we arrived, the old lady does 80kms flat out even with the wind in her sails.
A sign says “Welcome to Paradise”
‘Ah bus man’s holiday after all’ I thought with a smile
“ I have goose bumps on my arms” Penny said as I filmed her going under the banner driving the bus.
“Wow” she said, look at all these people, they are… so…”
“Like us Penny, different”
Penny looked at me, and now got why I recommended here instead of a weekend in Venice. We parked up, put our table out and went to meet the neighbors
“Hi”
“Hiiii, welcome Ozora…you drive all the way” they said looking at the number plate and hearing our accents
“No, we live in Transylvania, we came the other way”
Lots of slow nodding from the herd “Cool”
“Glass of wine any one?” Penny offered
“Acid, crystals, I have some great drops or some Nepalese black if you like” one them replied back with a genuine fake smile.
Penny eyes bulged at the collection of stimulates our neighbor had laid out in front of him. Enough drugs to put in prison for 20 years in Romania, a few hours away by car.
“Um… I’ll stick to the dry white for now” Penny said holding up her bottle of plonk.
“Ok, but just have a smoke with us” the smile coming back “As your neighbors”
“OK…”
Penny does not remember much else of the night we arrived.
I watched her pavement pizza disappear into the mouth of a cute little dog the next morning… glad in the thought of sticking to sparking water and mushrooms of the tinned kind from Tescos.
Within a few days we knew every one – even though they still couldn’t quite work out why a middle aged couple who knew nothing about Psy Trans and who did not take drugs, where doing here in a 40 year old hippy bus.
On the third day, a state of the art camper rocks up next to us, rolling up a 45 degree bank like it was a Land Rover and out falls Caroline, a social climber from Hackney with a bottle of cheap Hungarian wine tucked under her arm.
“What, your not into Trans and your here for the week?” she said as she gulped down the wine from a pint glass over dinner “Top bird, Penny, why the fuck not, I say”. Carolyn filled Penny in on the music and how people were ‘motivated’ to stay up all night and ‘slam it’ as she called it, to the music. Penny soon got into the swing of things and loved the beat, rolling up early… in the morning – having been out at the stage all night getting swept up in the whole buzz of the place.
It’s funny, peoples perceptions of stereo types. Yes every one was high as kite, yes they were dressed like they where out of a Mad Max movie, and yet I have never met a more well behaved crowd in my life. From the dance floor to the showers, everyone was polite and had a smile for everything.
On leaving our little piece of holiday paradise we felt we were leaving our new found little cottage on the Isle of White with fond memories of a week’s hols and plans to be back, same place, same time next year to slam it some more Carolyn and Co. and the thousands of other Psy Trans fans of Ozora 🙂
