Right so, if you’ve not been to Sonus Festival you’d better start listening now. My name is Danny Dwyer and I’ve been going to Sonus since the very start so what you’re about to read is more valuable than a Porsche made out of platinum or one of Calvin Harris’s pay cheques, so listen carefully you mugs!
The magic of Sonus happens on a beautiful little island in the Adriatic Sea called Pag, is proper exotic, just like something you’d see on a post card or travel documentary. Every time I’ve gone to the festival I’ve flown. It’s a pretty standard procedure, you can get flights to Zadar, Split and Rijeka. They make it nice and handy for us international tourists, there’s shuttle busses that run from all of these airports, which allows you to get totally pissed up on the airplane and not have to worry about sobering up when you arrive. I thought I’d change it up a bit last year and make a holiday out of it so I decided to hitch hike my way across Europe.
I started off by getting the train from London to Paris, technically it’s not hitch hiking but you don’t see too many ferries picking up hitch hikers in Croydon so it had to do. It’s a short enough hop and I’d left myself six days for traveling so I decided to take a little detour north to Amsterdam, to stock up on some, errr, well needed natural remedies, it’s a few hundred kilometers out of the way but I knew it would be well worth because I can’t sleep without my medicine, you know what I mean?.
After walking around Holland like a zombie for a couple of days I noticed I’d kind of lost track of time and decided it was time to move on. I made my way to the busiest road I could find and after standing for two hours on a Dutch motorway with my thumb out I decided that hitch hiking is for tarts so I went and got on a train to Berlin. I’d never been to Berlin before but I’d heard it’s proper naughty, especially this one club called Berghain. I still had four whole days to get to Croatia and I wasn’t hitch hiking anymore so that should have been lots of time. One night out definitely shouldn’t have been a problem, or so I thought.
I got to this club and the queue was half way down the road and nearly everyone in it was getting turned away at the door. Yet somehow I managed to blag myself past the bouncers, it must of had something to do with my boyish good looks and cheeky smile or else maybe he could tell I was a proper geezer and things would have got ugly if he’d turned me away, either way it didn’t matter because I was in. It all gets a bit foggy from here, kind of like being in some sort of techno dreamland or an Alice in Wonderland style afternoon tea party, only the tea was vodka and Redbull and Tweedledee and Tweedledum were big hairy German blokes is leather chaps.
After what felt like a couple of hours I looked at my phone and realised that I’d been lost in that club for nearly three days. I had approximately thirty six hours to get to Sonus so I picked my brain up off the floor and headed for the nearest exit. After five days on the road I’d only managed to make my way to poxy Berlin. Thank fuck for the internet! I got myself onto Skyscanner and booked the next flight to Zadar via, Marseille, Genoa and Milan, it took me about twenty one hours, which gave me plenty of time to catch up on some sleep before I arrived.
Looking back hitch hiking probably wasn’t the best option, it was good fun but it cost me a small fortune. Next time I’ll definitely fly straight from London. I heard there are travel community pages on Facebook where you can get in contact with people traveling from the UK, and even other countries like Germany, France, The Netherlands and Spain if you’re foreign, where you can get in contact with other geezers and arrange a right knees up on the journey over. That sound fun to me.
