Rocking the Daisies is Cape Town’s largest music festival. It’s somewhere between Coachella, EDC and Floatopia, only ten times cooler because let’s face it- it’s in Africa. We left on Friday afternoon, and would have arrived before nightfall had we not taken a twenty minute detour down a dirt road through a township, gotten stuck in a sand dune of a road, and had to push the car back to paved civilization. After re-google mapping the directions, we pulled up to Cloof Wine Estate, home to the festival, just as the sun was beginning to set over rolling hills of grape vines. We set up our tent on a literal bed of wild flowers and prepared for the evening.
Friday night was a blast; after exploring the various stages and dancing until 3 in the morning we called it a night. Sleep was hard to come by considering the drum and bass in the background and the fact that we packed four people, our luggage, and a weekend’s worth of food into to our three person tent. We got up with the sun the next morning and wandered around the festival, taking in scenes of giant neon flowers, big stages, and hippie vans selling crazy hats. We skipped the musical acts that I had never heard of before (which was all but one, Jeremy Loops, look him up, he’s fantastic) and spent the rest of the day at the lake (pond). Watching people sun bathing, floating on rafts, mattresses, tubes or anything they could find, let’s just say I’ve never wanted a kiddie pool more.
That afternoon we napped, ate, recouped, and got ready for night number two. Saturday was even more fun than Friday- I could have danced all night, and was well on my way to doing so, until Jess’ wallet was stolen. She brushed it off, not wanting to ruin the mood of the night, but when Molly’s camera was stolen right out of her purse, we all got a little uneasy. That’s when my crime fighting skills kicked in. Noticing one guy that had been near us during both incidents, I kept my eyes peeled for anything suspicious. He definitely didn’t fit in- wearing a button down shirt and rain jacket (at a music festival). What’s more, there was at least three more just like him, and to my paranoid mind they were clearly all working together. When I saw him pick pocket a girl right in front of me, we told security. They took me to the makeshift police station where I had to identify the one along with two other suspects only to find out that they were members of a Nigerian gang that had robbed hundreds of people that night. Cool- that would have been nice to know before pissing them off.
Luckily I had no pockets and not so much as a rand on me, and I managed to evade trouble for the rest of the night. We stayed up till morning and briefly watched the sunrise before passing out. All in all it was an incredible weekend, although I have no pictures to prove it and I’m probably on a hit list somewhere in Nigeria. Totally worth it.
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