Guys, we have been hearing about Wonderfuit Festival ever since it launched back in 2014. Every year we think about going but the more we waited, the more expensive the tickets would get.

Artwork by Wonderfruit.co

This year, at the 6th installment, we are finally going!

Shoutout to my friend who managed to get us an awesome deal (you know who you are).

Now if you don’t know what this festival is, it’s kind of like (so they say) Coechalla meets the burning man of South East Asia. It’s multi-day music, arts, food, and ideation festival. It’s known to be epic and in December, we get to experience it ourselves.

After a lot of research, we have a few mixed emotions. Excitement, nervousness, and anxiety. The biggest mistake we can make is going unprepared. So as we make plans, we are going to share them with you.

Make sure you check out Instagram stories and Facebook posts too.

Picking a place to stay

Now Wonderfruit has made it easy to find accommodations in and outside the festival area. The cheapest being “bring your own tent” and putting it up in a designated area. Wonderfruit Festival also provides a glamping experience from fan/AC tents (30-40k Baht and sold out) to Boutique RVs (70k Baht). Most of these sleep 4 people so if you share with people, it comes out to be about 7,500 – 17,500 Baht per person for 4 nights.

Photo cr: Wonderfruit.co

Not bad but by now we only have a choice between basic camping or renting the RV. Neither suits our style or budget.

We decided to look for a place in Pattaya instead. Wonderfruit has even partnered with 3 hotels around the city with great packages but all of them were still above budget so we searched for our own.

We had 2 criteria for it:

  1. the hotel or condo (Airbnb) should be near one of the partnering hotels offering free shuttle service to the festival
  2. the hotel or condo should not be over 1,000 Baht/night.

After a short search, bingo. We found the perfect Airbnb apartment. A little far from the free shuttle pickup point (nearest one being Siam@Siam) but it will do.

This is the package and shuttle bus service times from Siam@Siam in case you’re interested. I am definitely aiming to make it on the 15:00 to Wonderfruit and hopefully lasting till the 3:00 am return shuttle. Wow, 12 hours x 4 days…good luck to me.

What to pack? What to wear?

Cue anxiety. People really dress up for these things. Basic shorts and T-shirts aren’t going to cut it.

We started looking at Pinterest and lookbooks for inspiration. Some of it was too much.

Our style of choice – boho chic. We don’t want to overdo it, it’s just not us. At the same time, we want to dress up enough to belong. Accessorizing with sunglasses, hats, and scarves is a must. Who knows, maybe add some fake tattoos or bio glitter if we are feeling spunky.

On top of that, since it is a four-day festival, we need to make sure we pack enough things. Clothes for the festival. Clothes for sleeping. Gadgets. Personal care and hygiene items. We have to make sure all these things are packed in our suitcase. Then we need to decide which of these things should go inside our festival carry-on pack.

Research! Making sure we know what to expect

The first thing we had to do was, of course, to carefully read every single little detail on the Wonderfruit website. There is a lot of info up there. Like a lot.

But, that is not enough. We had to go beyond what they tell us. We wanted to know what others say. So we did more research. We came across plenty of blogs but this Guide to Wonderfruit by The Nitty Gritty Guide turned out to be extremely useful. It’s thorough but also to the point. Everything you need to know and plan is on this one page.

Also, this amusing post by Coconuts is quite helpful too. It gives a real perspective with things that can and probably will go wrong.

The main thing is to expect the unexpected and to go with an open mind. That is exactly what we plan on doing – to be lost and completely immersed.

Who to Watch & What to do

Remember, the Wonderfruit festival is about much more than just music. There are literally hundreds of activities and performances to experiences across the festival field. We’re actually feeling a bit overwhelmed already thinking about it.

Luckily the website makes it quite easy to filter out the types of things to do there. For example, if you’re looking for workshops, just filter that out at the top. Same for performances, music artists and even food/retail vendors.

Here are some workshops and activities we’ll be looking out for:

All the art installations / Sunset fire show / Triger Drum at Solar stage/ Opium by Visual System – Polygon stage / DIY creative accessories /Eco-friendly glitter station / Bamboo weaving / Earth pigment painting / Precious plastic (using plastic to make products) / The wild robot

As for the music, to be honest, none of them look familiar to me. Except for Daboyway and my boy Undaworld! I guess I am too mainstream but that is what will make Wonderfruit so exciting. To discover new talents and music.

I heard there is a hip hop stage ( SOT), so I plan to be there most of the time. SOT stage even has winners and finalists from Red Bull 3Style competition playing at Wonderfruit. That should be awesome!

That being I’ll still definitely check out other music genre stages. I’m keeping my ears up for some deep bass, sick drops, and melodic sounds with vocals. Stuff like A/K/A Sounds sounds orgasmic, for example.

See you soon Wonderfruit

Anyways, we (especially Shayan) cannot wait for Wonderfruit Festival. Again, it’s our first time and we are riddled with excitement and a bit of anxiety. I hope it all goes well.

Update: Wonderfruit launched an app where you can see the entire program and schedule from your phone. It’s so convenient! The best feature is that you can create your own schedule by adding all the things you’re interested to see/do/hear and add alarms or notifications to each.

Stay tuned for the next post on our Wonderfruit experience.

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