Vietnam’s Quest Festival — Searching for the Good Times
By: Matt Pike
Tags: Festivals, Vietnam, Travel, Articles, Short Story

When we found their tent, one among the hundreds lined together like gravestones, the Dude-Bros were just getting up. You could almost count the number of drinks they’d had the night before by the rings around their eyes.

“Have a good night?” I asked.

“Dude,” Mr.Clean said, rolling over inside his tent. “Turtle Tent was fucking lit.”

In the next tent over, somebody we didn’t know groaned and flailed around violently. “Voices,” he said, muttering to himself. Then he laughed in a weird, monotonous way. “You’re all monsters.”

“What?” I said, giving Other Dude-Bro a look.

“He’s been saying shit like that all morning,” Other Dude-Bro said, shaking his head. “I think he took a bunch of acid.”

“Monsters?” I said, lowering my voice. “No … the devil. Beelzebub. 666.”

“Oh my god…” The guy squirmed around, moaning in horror like he was in the trunk of a sinking car. We left him trying to jab his limbs through the walls of his tent. He wasn’t quite ready to get dragged off to the Dove’s Nest — the place where doomed trips went for help — but he was pretty close. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

“Joint?” I asked Other Dude-Bro.

“Might as well,” he said.

It’s never too early for a ride on a party boat

I spent the whole rest of the afternoon leaned against a tree, only standing to refill my eco-cup with more Nada beer. Joint after joint, beer after beer, taking in a long-exposure impression of Quest.

This is going to sound really bad, but I felt oddly uninspired by everything there. Even though there was so much beauty all around me, it felt like an empty-calories kind of experience for some reason. It just seemed like a bunch of people with no idea how to pass the time — too many people who needed intoxicants or drugs or distractions to enjoy themselves.

“What are we doing next?”

“I don’t know.”

“And then?”

“No and then.”

“They look pretty fucking stupid.” … “Yeah, but at least they have a lot of money.”

Alright, that was a bit too negative. That was the voice of miserable me as I struggled through overlapping hangovers. My brain was fried and I never could drink enough water to make up for what I was losing in sweat. Despite my grumpiness, Quest really was a well-run festival. The tents were up and ready for us when we arrived. The service at the bars was actually pretty good considering how fucked up everyone was. And the music was fucking awesome. I never knew it was possible to play the drums with a water buffalo skull, but it is.

I mean, come on. That’s fucking awesome.

This guy was seriously the highlight of the whole festival

I think my grumpy-old-man mood came from being forced to be around people for so long. During the day I usually hide in my room, but there was no escaping Quest. The tents were ovens, and every time I heard one of my neighbors shuffling around, it broke my tenuous illusion of privacy. My capacity for being around people had already filled up — and I got the impression as I watched people slumping around that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Quest is tough on introverts.

But when night finally comes, the whole atmosphere changes. People stop wandering around looking for something to do. Some hover around speakers and DJs like moths to the flame, while others sit under psychedelic lights and let the music ripple through them — tribal scenes of blissful partiers and wary onlookers.

Those who aren’t on some kind of drug cocktail watch those who are. Some watch with a kind of despair in their eyes, like they’ve somehow lost their sense of where the good vibrations come from — painfully aware of being an outsider who can’t find the wavelength for fun anymore — unable to twist their mind into the rhythm without drugs.

And so they take drugs and dance until the sun comes up, chased by visions as they slip over the mud, making weird conversations with strangers who move around them like chromatic shadows, floating through crowds until they’re too tired to stand and then eventually they find their tent and pass out beside it because it’s too damn hot inside. They look at the sky and search for constellations but find nothing so they gaze into the back of their hand, trying to ignore the sounds of people having sex by focusing on the distant bass still coming from the Turtle Tent but they can’t ignore the wet noises of two people on ecstasy trying desperately to cum.

And then security checks if they’re alive.

“Hello, this your tent?” Above me stood two security guards, poking me with their batons.

“Yes,” I said. “My tent.”

“Quá nóng,” (Too hot) Jess said from inside the tent. The guards burst out laughing and continued on their rounds, leaving me under the stars with a flip-flop digging into my back.