The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why small festivals are a big hit with me
Community events on a human scale are the best way to fall in love with a country, says Anna Hart
For most of my life, I assessed the attractions of any festival or global event based on how big they were. At 16, I assumed that bigger was better when it comes to festivals; the bigger the headline band and the bigger the field, the bigger my bragging rights were in the classroom. My first independent travel experiences, as a music-obsessed teenager, were Megabus pilgrimages to bigbudget festivals with big-name acts and big crowds such as Reading, Bestival and Glastonbury. More recently, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Edinburgh Festival, the Rio Carnival… they all found a place on my list-for-life purely because of their size and global acclaim.
But anyone who has been to Venice for the Biennale, New Orleans for the Jazz Fest or Monaco for the Grand Prix knows that these large-scale events and festivals resemble expeditions more than holidays. This summer, with social gatherings and arts events back on the menu, amid much tedious talk about capacity, ventilation, international attendees and social distancing, we are forced to re-evaluate how we view mass gatherings. And our travel experiences might just be the richer for it.
Because alongside my cherished holiday memories of big-hitter international events, I’ve realised it’s often the smaller community gatherings that made me fall in love with a new destination – at a fraction of the expense and hassle. When I arrived in New Zealand, for a year-long work/travel trip in my late 20s, I began researching the nation’s summer festivals and events, such as Lollapalooza and Big Day Out. My friend Joanna (who now edits Australia’s biggest travel magazine, so I was correct to trust her) listened patiently to my plans to prioritise these crushingly commercial and hopelessly homogenous music events – and invited me to the community-driven Tairua Food and Wine Festival in the Coromandel, Auckland’s holiday home heartland.
When I think about New Zealand, and the Kiwi character, I call to mind images that I absorbed that day. I saw big, burly farmers swigging glasses of rosé and enthusing over the bouquet to local teenagers, and realised that in New Zealand, a passion for wine is a gloriously democratic pleasure. Eating my way around different food stalls, I came to appreciate the patchwork of international influences and utter lack of snobbery that characterises Kiwi cooking; in Auckland a well-executed BLT is prized no less highly than a Michelin-starred soufflé. Best of all, some of the friends I met in Tairua, I still have to this day.
Much as I adore admiring the worldclass wizardry and permissible pretentiousness
at gardening shows such as Chelsea or Hampton Court Palace, this summer my horticultural highlight was the fête at my local community garden project, a lovely relaxed day among pretty plants, with nobody shuffling me on passive-aggressively for taking a bit too long to look at a water feature. And although the carnival in Rio was a true “trip of a lifetime”, navigating a hectic Brazilian city suddenly filled with 2million tourists is a bit of a battle – especially after a night of samba dancing. This summer my one festival trip was to last weekend’s Smugglers Festival in Deal, a half-hour drive from my front door. It was Smugglers that first challenged my misconceptions about local festivals, which I always feared would be mediocre, parochial and awkward. Instead I found myself dancing all night to world-class musicians; I returned as happily exhausted and uplifted by music as I did returning from Rio.
I know it’s impossible to compare experiences like these, but in the context of the Covid crisis, my summer of wildly enjoyable but smaller and more local events give me hope that all is not lost in the events sector. I’ve come to understand that size doesn’t always equal significance. Capacity isn’t always an indication of cultural clout. And however dedicated to gardening, music or food we are, however determined to tick off these bucket-list events, most visitors will grudgingly admit that we have had more enjoyable experiences at community gatherings, local festivals and fairs that nobody has heard of.
I understand the financial realities facing the arts and entertainment sector, and I’m painfully aware that many events – large and small – will not return in 2022, or ever. But one thing we can do as travellers is start taking smaller community events more seriously, supporting them and building our holidays around them. Because in 2021, even a small festival is a very big deal.