The thick of it

I had the tent and everything set up by about 3.00pm so that left a couple of hours before darkness fell. Dave had set his (modern) tent up in what seemed like about five minutes (and was probably less) so we went off together to have a look round. It's hard to describe the layout of the site but in general if you can imagine a quarry about a kilometer across where the centre has been excavated down to around 50m and various degrees of terracing  forming concentric circles around the central hole then you've got the general picture. All you need to add to the picture is that the whole thing is set into the side of a hill so just about everything is on a slope. The entrance is on the uphill side with a tarmac road running along one side. Walk up that road for about two kilometers and you'll come to Solla, the local village.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then this one may be worth more than all my efforts above -

It shows the "inner sanctum" area in the middle of the quarry. The shanty town in the bottom contained a few burger vans (although this being Germany it was more Bratwurst sausages than our usual horse burgers), a few souvenir stalls where you could buy Elefantentreffen branded hats, t shirts, jackets etc and a couple of "new age" stalls selling fur lined tie dyes and crystal healing type hippy apparel. As far as I could tell the women err.. manning these outlets constituted a fair percentage of the total female population of the site on the Friday although things did change slightly the following day.  On my previous visits to the rally in the dim and distant past there was a "buy now or forever hold your peace" approach to commerce so I was pleased to see that the rally now has an online shop. If you really can't live without Elephant rally branded underwear (female only!) then brush up your German and click through to www.elefantentreffen-shop.de   

The most important part of the pit though is the covered bar area and inevitable to say as evening wore on this is where we ended up. Considering how many people turn up here (the picture above is only a small proportion of the site) I was surprised at how few places were selling beer. I only found this one and one other place nearer the entrance so my guess would be that the vast majority of people bring their own. The same seems to go for food (three bratwurst vans for 10,000 people) and most noticeably, toilets. I saw two toilets on the whole site, one of which was locked, so perhaps it's not surprising that the population was 99.9% male. When things really got into full swing the following night the seas of mud were expanding in direct proportion to the amount of beer consumed. I also noticed that none of the women I saw were drinking anything!

As Friday night progressed the bar area in the "arena" (to give the central area its official name" became a bit of a Brit alcove as we seemed to be gathering there either by accident or via text messages. It may well have been because it was better than the alternative which was an evening in the rain by your tent.  None of us had tents large enough to host a gathering and as the evening wore on and the rain gathered pace it was easier to stay rather than go.

Early evening (when I could still focus the camera)

Later on when things were getting a bit blurry

Much later when someone tried to burn down the organisers HQ

By the end of the evening it became quite a task to find our way out of the arena. Not only had the effects of the evening's "celebration" taken its toll but the mud was getting ever deeper and we had to somehow climb up the sides of the quarry and then find our way in the dark through a wooded area to a small hole in a wire fence that separated our camping field from the arena. Of course nobody had brought a torch.