Shopping Carts in Ravines

Spent last weekend at a teknival out of province.
That is, if you don’t know, a free and open, decentralized DIY/music festival held on “crown” land in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere.
This particular middle of nowhere was one of the most spectacular places I’d ever been to, with dune cliffs dropping down to sandy beaches, a shallow but large and very healthy lake that was lukewarm most of the time, rolling hills of forest and not a damn cottage in sight. The local ATVers kind of trashed the place and there was quite a lot of broken glass. I think the festival taking place actually did a good clean-up job on the area… and we were mostly tolerated as a strange camping surprise by the few locals who showed up to their secret spot.

I counted a total of 7 stages that showed up over the 4 days I was there, a few of which were shared by more than one soundsystem.

One stage, operated by two soundsystems from San Francisco, was brought up in and set up in front of their veggie oil living space bus, and they did a workshop on switching to and running on veggie oil. There was another small stage that was running on a setup powered by 12V batteries that had been charged on solar power.

There was also a first aid workshop and a blunt rolling workshop, as well as an open-ended flag making workshop that ran all the time (by having materials sitting in the workshop space). I ended up making someone a cape with some flag materials, and a shell necklace while sitting on the island listening to the first aid workshop.

It was an awesome place for a mycophile like me, though of course I wouldn’t have eaten or suggested anybody eat any, especially so far from civilization. There were blueberries and raspberries growing wild that people were eating, though.

The number of people in attendance dropped from last year, but I don’t think anyone was anything but happy about that, given how many sketchy people showed up last year and how few did this year. My estimate, based on counting vehicles, is that about 250 to 350 people showed up.

I was in the water for a huge amount of the time I was there… dancing in a lake to techno blasting off the top of a cliff at you is pretty fun.

I never realized how foul Toronto air was to breathe until I came back from this place. I was trying to find a way to switch my ride on the last day so that I would be able to stay another day, but couldn’t manage.

More photos up at http://flickr.com/photos/orbz/tags/teknival/

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Art and Music, DIY / Survival, Events, Life, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.