Wacken on the Map

It was the month of May. One of my friends and fellow ‘headbanger’ (metal fan) reflectively said, “You know, we can never call ourselves dedicated metal fans”. I was intrigued and a little offended. After all, I had been following the metal bands religiously since my school days. I asked my friend, if only to humor him, why he didn’t consider us real metal fans. “If you haven’t been to Wacken Metal Festival, you haven’t been to the Mecca of metal music”, my friend replied. And thus I set out for Wacken, Germany, to pay my respects.

The Wacken Metal Festival is one wild, living, breathing, crazy heaven. The hypnotizing beat of the drums, the uncanny guitar, the heavy bass, and the deep baritone voice of the metal Gods; all give a feeling of being on a spiritual journey, trying to be one with earth, heaven, and hell. The motto of the festival is ‘Louder than Hell’. The festival is fondly called as Wacken Open Air or WOA. The atmosphere during the festival is electrifying with over 70,000 fans camping on several large camping grounds surrounding the actual festival area. I was one of them and shared my tiny tent with two other headbangers from India (as crazy as me). From August 4, 2011 to August 6, 2011, my world was limited to the grounds of Wacken; my activities were limited to screaming the lyrics, headbanging, and consuming pint after pint of German beer. Around 70 bands mesmerized the fans over the course of three days with all kinds of metal music-thrash metal, heavy metal, black metal, and death metal.

For those rare hours when I was sober and the bands were not performing, I decided to explore this quiet town, so I took a stroll down the lanes. I was taken aback by the quietness of the place. Being host to the world’s largest metal festival, I had imagined the town to be bristling with energy and expected it be quite urbane. The people, like their houses, are quiet and modest and quite charming. I met one of the locals at the local supermarket and we got to chatting. He could speak broken English and I could only sing in German. He told me how Wacken has always been a peaceful place and except for the metalheads, not many people visit Wacken. Wacken has roughly over 2,000 inhabitants and swells to more than 72,000 during WOA. I enjoyed the peace and serenity that Wacken has preserved despite being the Holy Land of Metal Music.

Wacken does not have any real exquisite restaurants. Being sparsely populated, the town has small eating joints that serve local delicacies made of pork, beef, and poultry and does not indulge in anything exotic. The main source of food for me was the numerous food stalls at the festival site. They were lined up everywhere and especially inside the stage site they are one next to the other. Since 2009, the food stalls put their country’s flag over the tent.  So if you want Italian food, just seek out the food stall with the Italian flag. I was a little disappointed as there was no food stall bearing the Indian flag. For the three days of the concert I tried out cuisines from various countries like pizza from Italy, pita gyros from Greece, crepes from France, and much more.

Wacken is not only about the Metal Festival but also so much about the place itself. Despite hosting world’s biggest metal festival every year, the town remains humble. It is unaffected by the vagaries of big cities. For those of you still scratching your head wondering how to get to Wacken, the route is simple. Board an international flight from your country Bremen, Germany or to Hamburg, Germany. Wacken is located 10 km north of Itzehoe and 50 km northwest of Hamburg.