Sharing the Shambala love

Well, Shambala festival was fantastic - a beautiful weekend of folk & reggae music, catching up with old friends, smoky campfires, inspiring workshops, delicious food and trips into the Wilderness Wood with its modulated soundscapes and lightshows. My highlights are probably too many to name, but include:

- staying in a large tipi with our friends and their gang of teenagers. We built a fire to keep warm at night and stoked it up every morning to cook ourselves princely feasts of baked beans, toasted crumpets and gallons of hot, steaming tea

- giving my well-received workshop on biofuels on the Friday to a sizeable audience in the Rebel Soul tent. The organisers of the festival this year made a decision to run the whole festival using only renewable energy (including veg-oil biodiesel, solar and wind) so I got to showcase them as a positive example of using 'good' biofuels as opposed to the destructive types like palm oil, rapeseed and soybean. And it was a real confidence booster to get good feedback from people at the end of my workshop! Thanks to the Dubbers and J for turning up and sitting through it :)

- Compost loos! A new addition this year and a huge improvement on the chemical stinkboxes that festivals usually provide. There were only a few but they were the talk of the campsite and the organisers are planning on increasing the numbers next year.

- Sunshine. Yes. In England. In August. 'Nuff said.

- Awesome music ranging from my favourite locals the Friendly Fire reggae crew to Nuala and The Alchemy Quartet - a fun folk-pop band originally from Australia. Horace Andy the reggae legend was a bit disappointing as the headliner on Sunday night. Misty's Big Adventure were the essence of Shambalic randomness

- Fancy dress night on Saturday night. Everyone made an effort and there were some AMAZING costunmes. J and I had fun making and wearing our penguin costumes and parading around with her little teengage bro (we convinced him to come dressed as an ice-cube) and making up silly dances!