ORIGINAL POST DATE: 11.08.11
So after attending the festival, most of my expectations were correct and met, however, there were a few things that I feel could have made the experience even better. Here are my Top 5 recommendations:
1) DIRECTIONS
Since I traveled from Cape Town it has to be said that the map supplied on the Oppikoppi website is SUPER lame! I’ve never driven to Limpopo and their map sure as hell didn’t prevent me from getting lost (not that I got lost but that’s not the point). Even our hippie heads of the Western Cape supply a decent map on their psy-trance fliers, this definitely needs to be stepped up. Less animation and design and more practicality, these are people’s lives we’re talking about and considering the festival is 3 hours away from Jozi, this should be taken more seriously.
2) FESTIVAL LAYOUT MAP
The sign and direction factor at Oppikoppi was …well…non existent! The Red Bull Live Dance Floor was WAY over the hill and I’ve sure 12 000 / 16 000 people didn’t even bother to look for it as there was no signage. I found some other random bar that had a big screen outside BY ACCIDENT whilst looking for the Red Bull stage on Friday night. What was this place used for? I’ll never know. Such a small thing can make a big difference, who knows how many people missed out on the epic electronic acts due to this small factor.
3) MAP SIGHT MAPPING / GUIDANCE
So after finding a cool possie to set up camp it was basically impossible to find your way back to it! Even though people had SA flags, double cabs, and gimmicks, you can’t see ANY of it from a far due to the trees! The main road, Boom Road, had signs for a few other roads leading off but this meant NOTHING in the pitch black dark of night! As a female, I felt the festival definitely take enough measures to ensure our safety in terms of getting back to our campsites. I know doing this can be tricky since people park EVERY WHERE so here are two solutions: 1) Put a massive ass map on the corner of Boom Road and the subsequent cross roads. So if you know your road name and you’ve walked the wrong way, you can look at a map and at least SEE that! 2) A colour system. Put colour streamers or ribbons along and IN (not attached) all the trees down the main roads. So if one can’t remember the road names, one can at least remember the colour of one’s road! For eg. “I’m off the red road, which is off the yellow road which is off the pink road.” Campers literally spent HOURS trying to find their way back in the pitch black, torch or no torch, drunk or sober, EVERYONE got lost this weekend.
4) A FEW MORE LOOS
I appreciate the fact that (I assume) there were no, zero, zip toilets in the general camping area in order to keep staff out of the camping area. This is good, however, walking 1 km everytime one of us needed a whizz was ridiculous!!! At night it was ok because under the cloak of darkness we could let a little loose, however, during the day, we literally had to walk back to the main stage to use the loo! Maybe a few along Boom road (the entrance road that everyone uses) could have been cool for us girls. In their defense, the loos that were provided were very well maintained.
5) POSTING THE LINEUP
I know the lineup was available from the various bars but this seemed like an extra mission for nothing considering there were loads of MASSIVE screens on all the stages. If the line ups were rotated whilst the bands changed over, this would be cool. Remember what time artists were on and where became less and less important with each beer downed, this would have been a cool a free reminder. Plus, it would have reminded festival goers about the wide variety of artists actually playing at the festival.
These are small things that can make a HUGE difference at Oppikoppi, I hope they consider them for 2012 🙂
