What happened to me at Afrika Burn, attempted in real full sentences

(written the week after Afrika Burn 2012 - May)

I smell, and look, like I’m wearing a wolf. I also smell of diesel because it is splattered down my shirt and shorts. I check in my bags. They are soaking wet - the backpack is wet, and the tent bag is wet. How did I land up like this - an abomination to the squeak and shiny internationalism of the airport. What could have happened to me? What rolling waves of delirium could I have succumbed to?

On Sunday morning I rose. From my astoundingly good blow-up mattress, I rose up and peeked out of my tent. Above the mountains out back behind 6-ish the sun was shedding red up through the clouds - it was just before dawn. I pulled on my sorry-ass jeans, socks, crocs, a new shirt and jersey and scarf and walked out into the sprawling rubble of tents, caravans, roadways that make up Tankwa Town. I walked off through 9-ish out onto the playa. The guys by the Stasie Kafee were getting ready to shoot their anvil. I stood back and blocked my ears as hard as I could. The guy lit the trace of gunpowder with a cigarette and ran for it. It took about 2 seconds and then, with a massively loud explosion, the anvil shot up into the air about 4 metres, and landed perfectly, as the universal laws of gravity intended, on its foot. Perfectly heavy and not in any way suggestive of its recent loftiness. Morning had broken.



The mushrooms were kicking in. I borrowed Peter's bike and my god a bike is the way to do it: Streaming along the playa - cruising through the air, racing along so fast and smooth - except for the erratic driving due to the psychedelics... I stopped by the rickety geodesic dome where someone had set up a music stage, with speakers, mics, drumkit and a grand piano. A crazy girl in a long red velvet cape, and outlandish black marks around her soft face was playing a tirade about how she was a wolf, howling and singing beautifully, and thundering rich deep chords from the piano. I stopped and rested on the bike a while.

About an hour after the San Clan burnt we came back to the fire - to get warm, and because there was space to sit in wonder at the huge pile of burning coals. We sat down and looked over at the other people around the fire, and realised that a whole bunch of boys and girls on the other side were sitting completely naked, warming themselves by the fire, like a Led Zeppelin album cover. A girl sat warm in a boy's arms. His back must have been freezing. And so we sat, watching the remarkable coals being so very very hot, and watching the naked people being slightly self-conscious and awesome. The next morning, after I watched the anvil being shot into the air, I took the bike and rode up to the remnants of the San Clan burn. It had reduced into a ring of heat-splintered boulders surrounding some deeply glowing hunks of lumber. The heart of the thing lay in the middle - a twisted mangle of metal shaped like a heart. It was untouchably hot.

The guy who burns the sculptures is wonderous. He has a neat full beard, and a tartan wrapped around him in a skirt, and a headpiece of feathers and a skull. And a stick of power. Sometimes he has a dapper leather waistcoat, but generally he is a bare-chested crazy ruler of the burn. We all gathered around the San Clan - we got there early and sat front and centre, and watched the fireshow - 30 people dancing with poi, staffs, flaming hula-hoops, and one mammoth, bare-chested guy in a golden cowboy hat with a gigantic ball of fire attached to a chain making huge circular sweeps with it. The girl in the hula-hoop danced in a spinning ring of fire, twisting her arms up and down to move it around, spinning it on her arm so it seemed it was a whirring hoop of fire hovering just off the ground, and a guy spun his poi right up in my face - just what you are looking for when the mushrooms are bazinga-ing. The fireshow fizzled out, and then there he stood before the towering sculpture - a 3-storey wooden tower with concave sides, and a multi-headed, multi-legged figure at the top. This beacon that had dominated the view since we got here - the tallest top, the 12 o'clock pinnacle of the tuileries that is the playa: a straight line from Off-Centre Camp, via the Obelisk of glowing blue fame, to the San Clan, and eventually further out to the massive bench, looking out over the fucked-up wasted country that is the karoo. And he stood before it - in his tartan skirt, and his headdress, and his stick and a blazing torch - and he danced a joyful dance - a truly joyful leg-up jig for 5000 people come to be crazy as can be and to burn shit - like a big joke that he has been telling and now this is the punch-line. Alone with the huge tower, and surrounded by the people - all of the people.

Friday evening as soon as we’d set up camp and eaten apples and biltong and taken a measure of the tequila, Mark headed off to set up his tripod. Peter & I did a circuit: The playa is a big open space in the middle of the camp, with an esplanade - Binnekring Rd. - running around it. Arterial roads run off this at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 o'clock. A second ring road, Buitekring Rd. runs further out. So we were camped at 9-ish and Buitekring. The Off-Centre Camp is at 6-ish. The pumping trance tents are at 2 and 10-ish. From 5-ish to 7-ish is the quiet zone. The San Clan is at 12-ish. And the thing to do is to take a passeggiata - like they do of an evening in small Italian hillside towns. You take a stroll around the Binnekring, taking in the sights. On bikes, on foot, in oddball cars and trucks and rickshaws. A man stands at the head of datsunbike: A monstermachine with the head of a mad max chopper, and the backseat of an old datsun. It's got big spikes out the front, and studs all over it and it rumbles hugely past. They're dressed in the oddest outfits - with glasses and paint and wings. A lady in a full blue body paint. A guy in a sea-green one-piece with huge silvershimmer butterfly wings. A set of silver airhostesses. I was pretty stoned, and we'd shared the tequila already, but that in no way accounts for the overwhelming sense of lightheadedness I felt. With that much crazy you for once really don't need drugs to have a good time – the place is truly trippy. We walked the whole way around, counterclockwise from 9-ish to 12-ish, beneath a gigantic god-movie-sky, and then stopped to take in the sunset, and then realised it was cold, and we should make food.

Simon has a boghog - a small electric scooter that he has converted into a travelling toilet. It has a seat, and a cistern. He has tiled the footplates. He pulls down his pants whenever he rides it, and he has a number of farting sounds on his iPod which he plays as he passes by. Later he came by wearing a black&white checked morphsuit - a one-piece lycra suit that covers from head to toe. He dressed as a priest to go up in the hot air balloon - he said to get closer to god.
Some people came in planes, and one guy came in a helicopter – which seemed like cheating, but was wonderful when they flew around the camp. We looked up from under the bedouin tent where we were sitting to watch a shiny devil-red plane zoom past upside down at 500 ft off the ground. I wandered off to pee by a bush a way off from the camps and watched the pilot pull a large slow loop the loop – full and grand and amazing

At 4 o'clock on the dot we head off for 7-ish so that 2 friends of Lara's could get married. They'd been getting ready for an hour already - pretty much like a normal wedding - with bridesmaids and everything. I sat in the dust and drew 'Sam' on Lara's back. The teenage girls were amazed and wanted panda bears on their wrists. The sweet little 7-year-old in the belly-dancing outfit also wanted a panda bear. I drew her one. I saw her the next morning leading against the back of their bedouin tent brushing her teeth - all full of self-responsibility. The 12-year old boy wanted a penis on his arm, until his sister said "What, are you gay?" Then he wanted a gun. I drew him a war wound, and some wings on his back. The tall remarkable englishman with the generous ego who had happily made me a delicious rice cracker with peppercorn feta, gherkins and olives was being the DJ on the truck that was to ferry us to the wedding. His DJ persona was a frenchman relating the happier state of his testicles now that it was drawing towards evening and had cooled down somewhat. We hopped on the truck and went to the wedding, playing funkalicious tunes to the people cruising the Binnekring. At 7-ish we hopped of and entered the wedding-tent. The minister was a rotund bald, small-eyed man dressed like Shrek - painted green, with a white shirt and a short rubber jerkin up around his shoulders. He called us all to the ceremony, and asked for all who had slept with the bride to come up and bear witness. The same people came up to testify that they had slept with the groom. They exchanged some vows which I didn't hear because I realised that the girl next to me with the beautiful boobs had no shirt on. We got teeny-tiny glasses of champagne and then headed off on a honeymoon cruise around the playa.

Someone had set up a very big laser – it must have been a rod of light about 5cm in diameter. Peter explained that they bounce light around in a tube until it harmonises, and then shoot it out the front, so it comes out as a solid beam, rather than immediately spreading and scattering. The beam shot solid from horizon to horizon – curving gently and showing us that indeed the earth is slowly round, and not flat at all.

I took a ride down 6-ish, the quiet zone - and like a wind dying off, the thumping noise was gone. 6-ish is a ramble of tents, cool, calm, quiet and lovely. It is behind the Department of Public Works - a huge workshop area where Afrika Burn is created - they've got a furnace made of earth packed around an oil drum - and so have a smith. They have a electrics workshop. The have a full medic tent. They move in 5 weeks before the event and set it all up. They have huge bedouin tents - large shaded structures under which various clumpings of normal tents sit. On Sunday we visited to look for Mark’s phone which we’d lost the night before. The guy lead us through the DPW to a caravan. He came out with a box of things and we looked through but no joy. Then the guy realised that he’d picked up an iPhone last night. We followed him to his bakkie and he pulled it out of his cubbyhole.

They – someone – have brought a monster death van with 3 flaming exhausts and a rear-mounted flamethrowing flak gun. This thing has a deathly grey skin, with teeth painted into the grill on the front. When they burn shit, this van pulls in and shoots blindingly hot flame at the falling sculptures. They burnt the intsy wincy spider – a big wooden thing with 8 legs and a skeletal torso that crouched on the ground – and the gunner shot flame down on it, damning it to death. He shot short bursts that ballooned into balls of fire above us.

They burnt the fear gods later on Saturday – at midnight. These were giant figures made of wickerwood – thin branchy sticks tied together to make frizzy, gangly, tall things that looked like stick-ents might look. The wind picked up so the sheltered side of each figure burnt like crazy – the wind pushes the heat through to the other side of anything that is burning, so you get a huge flame on one side first, and then the rest burns. The next morning there is an ashen burn shadow on the ground – a shortened shape of whatever had burnt, showing which direction the wind had been blowing. Around the 3 burnt-down fear gods a dude was jumping around with no clothes on – sensible boots, but no clothes. Another guy joined him – amazed at being completely naked around the fire – astounded at himself.

On Sunday morning I walked a labyrinth that someone had cleared in the rocky ground. The ground on the playa is terrible – swathes of dusty, hard earth, and then clumps of horrible blocks of ironstone. I thought it was pertified wood, because the rocks are ringed, but Peter, who knows about a lot of things, told me it was iron rich, so the rings are rust rings. This stuff is harder than normal rock, and red-black, and broken up on the ground into bits, from the size of dice to the size of dinner plates. It breaks into rectangular flattish bricks like solid litter. You can’t do anything with it. Below ground, the first layers of the earth are sheets of rock. Beside the toilets are mounds of earth that they’ve dug up – it is like a pile of slate. When you set up a tent you have to pound rebar into the ground – normal tent pegs just won’t go in – and the ground splits. So someone had brushed aside the chips of rock to make a labyrinth on the ground – a simple unicursal classical labyrinth where you follow the path round in a series of concentric rings, so you take about 5 minutes of time to move about 1 metre in space – which is the point of course. It was lovely and beautiful.

Joe & I went up into Obs to see if the bottle store was open. Way too early. We went into the Chinese shop that is where the Spar used to be 10 years ago. Obs is tiny – I forgot that the streets were so narrow. The Chinese shop has everything – I needed a raincoat of sorts – apparently we were going to get rain over the weekend. The guy sold me a blue – they only had blue – rain poncho. He had party hats and hula-hoops and groceries and electronics. They have everything in that shop. I never needed the rain poncho. It feels decidedly flimsy and porous, and I’m sure they’ve photoshopped the man in the picture so that it looks like the rain poncho is actually quite big. I am sure it will barely cover my shoulders.

At 2am on Saturday morning we stumbled over to some glowing sticks in the middle of the playa. At night everything is shifting and nothing is where it was when you left it. All distance is circumstantial, and is described by time, not space – you really don’t know where you are getting to, only that you have now come to somewhere new. Along the way you might have stopped to drive a human-sized hamsterwheel vehicle. A glowing 125CC goldfish might have driven by. A gloobling jellyfishmobile might have ambled off into the distance. The string of LEDs strung to balloons arching across the whole dark horizon sways and yaws like a gyroscope with a swaying gimbal – your sense of which way things were has been tampered with. So we angled over to the glowing sticks and realised with glee that they were swingball sets, the lines laced with glowsticks, and bats lying about. Peter & I played tangle-up with the string for a bit, and then decided to get our jedi on and saw the ball with our mind’s eye. Once we’d done that we smacked the ball with all our might, roaring like gladiators with our little plastic yellow racquets.

You can't talk in the Land Rover. The dirt road back out to Touws River is really rutted, and the old Land Rover has a million bits that shake rattle and roll so the car sounds like Tom Waits’ backing band falling down a flight of stairs. The car is turquoise blue. Donald has given it big plastic eyelashes. Lara has tied her nurse shoes to the front for a bit of class. The spare tire sits out front on the bonnet. There are cow skulls on the sides. The back door closes with a bit of rope. We filled up with diesel from the jerrycan - so Donald & I smell of diesel. The glove compartment above my head keeps flapping open on my head. I add the Afrika Burn programme to the doorstop to wedge it shut and that seems to work. The dirt road is shining, like a flowing golden thread. The weekend of cars has polished the surface. The landy goes at 70km per hour. Some time before the Hugenot Tunnel it starts raining and I realise that my bags are on top, so they'll be wet. The windscreen wipers bat the rain like overeager toy soldiers. This is definitely a better way to travel - slow, rickety and daft.

I lost them – it is easy to drift away at night, and the mushrooms make you amble in your brain. So I headed of through the vast emptiness between the embers of the fear gods and the arc-lights of the men working on the t-rex, and found some people lighting lanterns. A girl held hers upside down under mine, so her firelighter lit mine, and I turned the lantern back over and let it fill with air, and then let it go. It lifted off, which I suppose is what it does. I walked a slackline with a pretty girl holding my hand. I played giant noughts and crosses on the ground. I had an ice-cold Windhoek draught. I got sprayed down by a guy with a backpack full of water. I skimmed flat ironstones along the dusty ground and they bounced like pebbles on a pond. I said hi to the guy showering in the next-door camp. I tried on spring legs and tumbled down into the dust. I climbed up the inside of a giant plywood crystal sculpture and drew a rocket ship. I watched a set of giant pendulums with gradually shorter arms in a line one behind the next conduct their way through a frequency modulation and oohed and aahed when they reached a harmonic. I met a guy from Sweden named Pele who wore a Southern Death Cult outfit. I gave a girl in glasses whose lenses were both different sizes and different elipses an apple – someone gave me extra and they were so sweet.

On the drive out, in the land rover with the eyelashes, I realised that the most remarkable, most deep-seated thing about the weekend was being there and nowhere else. No cellphone coverage, no money, no time. It meant that without realising it, I had slipped into the moment fully and completely, and that we were now slowly rattling back out of it, but that it would take 4 hours to drive out of that frame of mind. When I got to the camp – to Tankwa Town - I put my cellphone and wallet in the Jeep - I didn’t need them at all – they were useless. It felt remarkable to not spend any money – we got the mushrooms free, I got the beer free. We didn’t buy a thing all weekend. I gave some people biltong, and one guy who had eaten cereals and starches for 3 days we gave a delicious fatty, hot lamb ribbetjie and he just melted. And I gave people tequila. It was the most strange and simple feeling – so much easier to give and get than to buy.

Next year: Shade, and transport, preferably in a single venture – a mobile lounge is the suggestion, with a ice-box, tunes, fishing rods, very tall flags and space for extra passengers to make friends with.