Zambia, Solipse 2001
It is strange, trying to piece history together from a time before mobile phones. Images are difficult to find. I sure left my camera behind in 2001. In that year I travelled to Zambia for the solar eclipse of June 21. I ended up at the Solipse psychedelic trance rave somewhere Northeast of Lusaka among people from all over the globe. The story goes a group of Japanese arrived in a chartered Boeing 747, although that seems hard to believe.
The rave lasted for seven days from June 18 to June 25 with non-stop music blasting from the sound rig, which was trucked in from South-Africa. LSD “micro-dots” were easy to buy and so was pure MDMA. Amazingly the festival was opened by the Zambian Minister of Tourism.
I met a wild bunch of people from Israel, the United Kingdom - but they were actually from France and Brazil - and a Dutch guy who worked on Wall Street and was just moving back to The Netherlands to start a new trading division at a Dutch bank. I hitchhiked together with some Brits to the location in the back of a small truck. One of them had bought a big brown paper bag containing cannabis on the streets of Lusaka. He assumed the bag would contain some 5 grams of the plant at best. Imagine his surprise when he discovered the bag was completely full of cannabis. He was screaming. We tried our best but in one week we could not finish the bag.
