Hideout Festival in Croatia
Two days following my trip to Berlin, and feeling a little jaded, i was shipping out to Croatia for the Hideout festival. Predominantly a electronic and dance music festival the event was hosted on the up and coming Zrce beach, just a stones throw from the town of Novalja, on the island of Pag.
Hideout was created by a collective of some of the best UK promoters, such as the Warehouse Project in Manchester and Wax:on in Newcastle, ensuring a stellar line up of DJs, bands and musicians at the festival.
I was out there for a week, with a couple of days either side of the three day festival to sit back and relax.
Compared to say Ibiza, the worlds best known clubbing haven, Croatia is cheap as hell. A pivo (pint of draught beer) costs you roughly 15 kuna the equivalent of £1.70 (c$2.50) or so compared with five times that for Ibiza. Food too was also very good and would cost you less than 15£ (c20-25$) per person per meal, including drinks. No wonder then, that the festival was a sellout and the town awash with young ravers ready to have a good time.
The three main clubs on Zrce beach were Papaya, Aquarius and Kalypso all of which are fully outside and run pretty much 24 hours a day with no sound restrictions. Its a clubbers paradise of sorts, the weather is so good in the summer that its pretty easy to go the clubs in shorts and sandals only with temperatures during the day of 30 plus in the high 20s until very early morning making it an ideal spot for an all nighter.
Simian Mobile Disco
(Simian Mobile Disco going for it!)
We stayed in a small apartment on Polski Put, just a couple of minutes walk from the main beach front of Novalja, which was lined with bars, ice cream stalls and restaurants. One saving grace for this holiday was air-con You do not realise the value of it until its gone. My last trip to Croatia fills me with memories of sweating, constantly. Luckily our air-con worked this time, saving us a load of sleepless nights as we relaxed in our frosty cool flat.
The people of Croatia are very friendly, although i cant help thinking they were a little bemused by the hoards of English people taking over their town. Many of the locals dont speak a word of English, so our point and gesture skills were in full use. I cant wait to go back..