Luckily, the landscape is a treat, so once in a while we get out of the car and take a bite. Sorry, the drive fried my brain enough that I’m condoning bad jokes. But the first leg of the trek is incredible, at least when I have the alertness to enjoy it. It’s a bit startling, the swooping cliffs running directly into the sea, with just a wee lip holding the road we’re riding along. And they know how to do tunnels here. I can’t imagine what this trip was like a hundred years ago when there were only curvy roads up and down the Pyrannes.
A strange déjà vu feeling overtakes me as I progress along the coast. It goes like this- it’s lush and green, then I enter a dark tunnel, and 300 metes later I’m dumped back out into the sunshine. I’m blinded for a second and then my eyes adjust and a town comes into focus, resting in the elbow of two mountains. Everything is terracotta, cream, and windows, and there’s always a church adorned with a single steeple at the center of every short glimpse I can steal. And then the road teeters off around the side of the mountain, and the scenario repeats itself. Since I’m driving I never have time to glean any features that define one town from the next. But I imagine they’re all ruled by A Hundred Years of Solitude-like magical-realism.
So, fellow travelers, what is with the toilets in Italy? Mine had a pop up seat, and when I sat down, the thing ran on some weird mode impersonating the sprayer that keeps vegetables moist at the market. I was not impressed.
It happens, we arrive. Also, I embellished a bit- I only had to drive from St. Tropez to Vienna, where the festival is picking us up and driving us for the final hour and a half leg. Our artist liaison Katra meets us at Vienna International and we’re on our way. It’s quite nice to not be driving for a bit. Come to think of it, this might be the first time I’ve been driven around for any sort of significant distance in over a month. What if I had all those extra hours every day to do things like, you know, type in my blog? And so I have a pull of whisky and get to typing. Which is a laborious effort, seeing as I never learned to type properly. I’m getting better, but I still need to look at the keyboard since my ring fingers don’t like doing things like typing ‘l’s and ‘o’s. That’s what I get for growing up in that liminal space of computers becoming household items. I didn’t have a computer in my daily life until I was 18. So it goes.
I must pass out for a bit, cause the ride doesn’t seem like 180 kilometers. The hotel is amazing, but after all day in the car, I decide I want to go to the festival for a bit. The band stays behind and I go exploring with Katra. Pohoda takes place on the grounds of the regional airport of the city of Trencin. The airport is closed down for the weekend, and the stages are set up on the tracts of land between the runways. It seems be large enough to accommodate 50,000 people or so, but it has much more of a communal, small town feel. Maybe I just feel that way because I’m arriving late, and everyone is drunk and groping each other or puking on the ground. Katra shows me around a bit before leaving me to my own devices as I watch Autechre.
It’s a pretty surreal experience, a whole outdoor tent packed with people, throbbing in complete darkness as Autechre executed their seminal brand of off-kilter electronica. Their complete lack of a light show is intriguing. Your eyes transition from cones to rods, and faces appear in blues and browns. The crowd pulses like buoys bobbing in the ocean, punctuated with occasional MDMA-fueled hand grabs into my hair for an amazing sensory experience, I’m sure.
As soon as I try to find a cab, I realize why we have an artist liaison. Security does not speak English, and I soon discover that neither do most cabbies. So although I told myself I was going to figure out how to navigate the 10 kilometers back to the hotel myself, once a security guard stops me and puts me in a corral with a whole load of other people speaking Slovak, I concede defeat and text Katra, asking her to call me a cab. So far, Slovak is quite a bit below French and German on my “languages to learn” list, but before I ever come back here, I better learn some travel friendly phrases.
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