FREE PARTY
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FREE PEOPLE
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I
n April 2015 I spent three weeks travelling down the Iberian coastline through Spain and Portugal, slowly making my way to Freekuency Festival. Freekuency is a free festival a few miles out of Frontiera, a very remote town in eastern Portugal. It was born out of the free party movement, organised by people who pioneered the rave scene in England. All of the artists, performers, crew and helpers work and play for no payment whatsoever. It’s a non profit festival, and any funds they do end up raising through donations and on the bar get put towards putting the next years festival on. These principles really make the festival, and they filter through to the people who come to party. Everyone there is there to have a good time, and escape reality for a while. I felt like I was part of something bigger than just a party as well, for a lot of people it’s their way of life. I found that the majority of people there lived in trucks and vans and spent their lives moving around going to festivals all over Europe. Officially it’s only supposed to last a weekend, but because it’s so far removed from any big towns and because of Portugal’s very loose laws on free parties it generally ends up lasting much longer than a weekend. This year it went on for just over a week, but I was only there for the weekend. The biggest part of my trip really wasn’t the festival though, it was the slow journey through Spain and Portugal. I got a lift to
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Spain with my dad, and spent a few days at his house there doing some renovation work before leaving him and heading south to Portugal. As soon as I go to Portugal I fell in love with the place. On my first night there I met a couple of guys who owned a reggae bar, and spent the night drinking with them and talking about our shared love of music. The next day we ran into them and they took us to a local restaurant and introduced us to their friends. Everyone I met in Portugal was extremely welcoming and generous, even though it’s a very poor country with a lot of social and political problems everyone seemed to share everything. For example, one day in Lisbon I mentioned that I was hungry and thinking of going to get some food. One of the local guys that we’d been hanging out with overheard us, disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a bag full of bread, ham and cheese and told everyone to help themselves. Another good example is my train ride from Porto to Lisbon. The train runs twice a day, and it’s a three hour journey. I was running late, and couldn’t figure out how to buy a ticket in the station. I saw the train at the platform, so without buying a ticket I jumped on just as it was about to leave. I asked the conductor where I could buy a ticket from and explained why I didn’t already have one, and he just smiled and said “today, for you, this train is free”.
The journey from Lisbon to Freekuency was an adventure in itself. If you’re going by car it’s a 3/4 hour drive, but we didn’t have a car, or very much money. It ended up taking us 10 hours to get to the site. In Lisbon we’d befriended a couple of Norwegian punks who were also going and we decided to travel together. They’d heard from someone that if we got a train to Evora then we could easily get a bus or hitch a ride to Fronteira. When we got to Evora we went to the bus station, and it turned out that there wasn’t a bus to Fronteira for 3 days. We were about 70 miles away from the site, and it was getting dark. On the train we’d picked up a couple of people who were also going to the festival, and they decided to travel there with us as well. We sat down outside a service station and stuck our thumbs out. We sat there for about 4 hours before we eventually gave up, and called a taxi to get us to a slightly bigger town where we’d be able to find a lift easier. Eventually after one train, two lifts, and an hour long walk at 1AM we arrived at the festival.
words and pictures by Jasper Troje Tuck For more information; visit jaspertrojetuck.com
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