Colour Festival!

You get a plastic bag full of this powder!

When we had first got to Windhoek, a guy I met in a club, Adriaan, told me about the Swakop colour festival. Since it was being held on the 28th of December I initially hadn't given it much thought, but due to our change of plans it now seemed like a very good idea. After finally managing to find one of the stores that sold the tickets, and after standing in a queue for over two and a half hours (we weren't the only ones to think of this) we finally had the tickets for everyone.

Before colour!

The dress code said all white so there was some frantic shopping going on the day before the festival - it was quite amusing watching everyone in town suddenly just buying white! The day of the festival James and I met up with the others for lunch. They however, then decided to go back to their hostel for an afternoon nap, but James and I were keen to go straight to the festival. After all, there's not much point paying to throw colourful paint at each other unless it's light enough to see!

After once again queuing for ages we finally managed to get in. We were slightly confused for a few minutes until someone explained how things worked. First you had to exchange money for tokens, as the stall selling the bags of colourful powder didn't except money. Then, once we had the tokens we could finally buy some colour. unfortunately by the time we arrived all the pink and purple colour had been used up, leaving green, blue and yellow.



Admittedly, James and I weren't particularly interested in the music as to be honest, it wasn't that great. But that didn't matter as we were far more interested in bombarding each other with colour - two competitive natures + a battle like environment = a LOT of colour! By the time the others rocked up at the festival we were both completely green - an unfortunate result of the colour choice available. Quite a lot of people actually stopped us and asked for pictures, since we were literally covered from head to foot in colour (in my opinion everyone else was just being pansies about it!).

It was an absolutely amazing day and so much fun. I'm definitely going to try to find more colour festivals to attend in the future!