Review #6: Hulaween 2022

HULAWEEN REVIEW

HULAAAA

Sheesh where do I begin?

Let’s start off with camping. Hula you don’t have to camp in an orderly fashion, you can pick your spot wherever and how much room you want with it. We had an incredible set up bc of this perk.

The campgrounds are super cool bc a lot of people are allowed to throw renegades so there is stuff to do all night long and you can go looking for them.

I will say if you pull in at night the camping situation can be very confusing. I’ve been 5 times now and I still managed to get lost. Also it’s pitch black at night in camping. You can’t see ANYTHING unless people have lights or you do. I personally like it better than the blinding generator lights lol, you're really camping vs festival camping.

The security is very light when you drive in, and when you walk in the entrance it is light as well. The box office is on site and so convenient and easy to experience.

The crowd is very different than an EDM festival and that’s bc Hulaween is NOT an EDM festival.

It’s a Music and Arts festival, (what okee is suppose to be), and the art they have is INCREDIBLE. There is so much to do and look at. They have Spirit Lake where they put projections over the lake and basically have a whole show going on.

I will say a lot of people had no manners when walking through the crowd. They would just walk over all our stuff and not care who was around them. It was mostly younger people.

The artists are amazing, they have art work spread out across the area and even two stages in the spirit lake area. There are huge installations and so much to do. Live painters are there too.

Examples would be the Jellyfish swings, they had different houses you could walk into, one house had a secret door that took you into another secret room, they had performers in secret places, they had Barbie doll foosball lol.

They finally helped the sound out at the spirit lake stage by putting speakers in the back too, which was great, and main stage was loud as well. However the amphitheater is still lacking sound and the area is super small which also isn’t the greatest.

The production isn’t ever the craziest across all the stages but they still had fantastic lights and some lasers for some of the artists.

The String Cheese Incident is amazing. That Saturday night cheese set was awesome and they brought out these giant inflatables throughout the crowd. Bro.

I really enjoy how the Hollows and The Meadow stages were facing each other and it was almost like a prism arrangement that went down. One stage would play and when it stopped the other came on.

Medics were on it and I didn’t see majority of people wilding the fuck out bc the crowd is older. I went to get a medic for one person that passed out and they came right over with me and when I got back two medics were already there.

The bathrooms were pretty clean for the most part but they weren’t on it with the toilet paper as much as they could have been.

The water wasn’t good in the campgrounds and the showers. It smelt really bad. They had showers in the actual bathrooms and those were better than the campground ones.

A couple people I talked to said VIP isn’t worth it.

The venue is incredible. Suwannee is a profound place with such an awesome energy. They cap the festival at about 25,000 people and I would say the only place that gets very crowded is the amphitheater. Everywhere else people are very spread out and there is room.

A lot of people were upset that a lot of the EDM artists were on Thursday, this was due to a lot of these artists playing other festivals and shows over the weekend such as Freaky Deaky which IS an EDM festival. Like I said, Hula is not.

This year the temperatures were very nice but definitely warmer than previous years. *cough cough global warming*.

The vendors were all over and in a formation where it was like a shopping mall. They all have a ton of room and you are able to roam comfortably.

The food was good, I enjoyed what I ate all the days, but of course it was still expensive.

The music is so stunning. You can go from a jam band to experimental bass to house to jazz and on and on. Multiple genres are present and you WILL leave finding a new artists or two.

Also shout out to Zingara. Wow. She started her set with her song Astra, dropped the second drop in the middle of her set and then closed the set with the last drop. It was INSANE, so creative especially cause the song talks about boarding spaceship project Zingara. She literally took you on a journey thru space. Check her out.

Overall, Hula is hands down one of my favorite festivals to go to. It’s such chill vibes, everyone there is so nice and just having a good time. I really also like not having to be at a set at every given moment and just hang out with the people you’re with and get lost in the experience.

Thanks for reading!