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Intro The Earlies Gates Open Shangri La Saturday The Balloon Lady Saturday Night Glorious Sunday Leaving
Here are a couple of shots from Thursday morning...
Thursday evening I met up with a girlfriend and we decided to visit the 'late night area' of the festival - a sort of self-contained, fenced-off and built-up area. This micro-festival - a festival within a festival - consists principally of Shangri La and Arcadia (there's also an area called Block Nine and a place called The Unfair Ground - I think).
You have to queue up and walk through a winding maze of fencing. It's serious crowd control, and heavily manned by security. For a long time I had been hearing scary stories of how bad the crush could be in this place late at night - as everyone headed there after the big stages closed. They were using this queuing system - about a mile of it I guess - for the first time this year to address the problem.
We walked at speed and it took us 30 minutes to get through the 'gate'. It was a smart move doing it now. I really wanted to see the place at night (I never have) and we learned that for the rest of the weekend it was taking 2 hours to get in.
I'm not sure which bits we actually saw. It was dark and very slippery. We held on to each other (four legs are better than two) and every now and then I would stop, hand her my beer and take some shots. After a while I was walking about waving the camera around and shooting randomly. How one or both of us didn't fall over seems like a miracle.
Next: Saturday
