SOUTH FRANCE HOLIDAY VILLAS: Best festival of my life

From left to right: Jake, Gina (me), Sander, Becca. All on our way to the festival.

Festivals have always been one of my favourite places to go, the atmosphere is just so awesome and everyone is happy and drunk and dancing and it's just such a fun place to go to.

Jake has been going to Electrobeach in Port Baccarès for the past 3 years; one year I asked to go with him but he gave my seat in the car away, meaning I had to stay home (I was very angry). This year I made damn sure that I would be at that festival. I bought ticket for myself, Sander and Becca (a friend of mine who was visiting from the UK) and we all looked forward to it for ages.

Here are some points that you might like to know about:

Location:

Electrobeach is quite literally on the beach, it's right next to one in fact. There's so much sand everywhere that you do kind of have to prepare for it, which is something I didn't know when I decided to wear a brand new white crop top (it wasn't white by the end of the night).

Toilets:

The toilets are clean (for the first few hours, as can be expected in every festival) and there is toilet paper (again, only for the first couple of hours).

Food and drink:

The food and drink is ridiculously overpriced, but you get that at every festival you go to; if you don't fancy spending a fortune on food and drink then you can follow in Jake's footsteps - he didn't eat for about 14 hours. There are water fountains in a lot of different corners of the festival so you can fill up your water bottles as much as you want and splash water on yourself when you get too hot (this is the South of France, it was scorching).

Payment:

They have a strange system at Electrobeach; the bracelet that they give you has a microchip in, so you go to a cabin and "charge it up" with money, and then from there on out whenever you want to buy something, all you have to do is hold your bracelet up to a machine and there you go. This would be a great system if they don't rip you off in the process. 10euros of real money is worth only about 7 of "EMF money", so you run out pretty quickly.

Health and safety:

Security is pretty good, I saw a few people get yelled at for being idiots and they did their best to keep the drunk people on their feet. They even had a tent where really drunk or ill people were taken to lie down whilst waiting for ambulances.

The people:

You see so many different types of people there, the festival is really for everyone. Don't be surprised to see a lot of people dressed up running around, they're having the best time and are harmless, they just want to have fun and give people a laugh. I saw a couple of people with really young kids there, and although this is pretty cool, I wouldn't recommend it because it gets seriously crowded.

Hanging out in front of the main stage - blazing hot.

Pretty close to the stage.

Sundown at Electrobeach.

My experience of the festival was incredible. It starts at 2pm so we got there a little bit later, we had to go to chalets in order to get our bracelets. You need to bring your ID with you to collect the bracelets (something that Jake forgot after telling all of us a million times to not forget it - the irony) although if you're lucky like Jake was, they'll let you in anyway. Once you go through the main gates, security will ask you to open your bags so that they can search them, you yourself will be searched and they will make sure that any bottles of drink that you have with you are sealed (they forgot to do that with us, I assume because we got there late).

Once the searching is over, you head towards the festival after being stopped by a photographer asking you to pose in front of a big screen. As soon as we turned the corner, Jake went insane. The music was pretty loud and there was hardly anyone there, they were all at the beach for the day and were most likely going to join the festival later on. We found a wall to sit on for a little while and waited for the music to get louder and for the better DJs to show up.

After a while we moved to the front and really got into it, loads of people seemed to show up to see DJ Fresh (my favourite), he was awesome, he really connected with the crowd and was talking to us and getting us to do loads. The other amazing DJs were Tiesto, Zedd and Armin van Buren. There were other DJs there like Axwell Ingrosso, DJ Smash, Mr Probz, Erick Morillo and a few more. Everyone was amazing but there are always a few that really stand out.

We sang and danced all afternoon and evening before deciding we were all starving, so we went to grab a hotdog and chips (not too badly priced) and chilled out for a bit. Once the sun went down it became impossible to find our friends again, so we all left the crowd and met up at a meeting point, from then on wherever one person went, we all went because the crowd was so massive it was insane.

I can't describe to you how amazing Electrobeach was, we spent 14 hours there, plus 1 and a half spent in the car park sitting on cold gravel at 3 in the morning before driving home and dragging ourselves into a petrol station to raid the sandwich aisle at 4am. I've been to a few festivals in my time and this was by far the best. The atmosphere and the way everyone was so friendly with each other was incredible, I didn't see one punch up. There were so many nationalities there it was unreal - it's not called the biggest Electro festival in France for nothing. Sander and me will definitely be going back there next year if we're not still in Asia. Make sure that you go to this because it'll be the best day of your life.