Tens of thousands of Splendour in the Grass revellers were soon faced with the bleak realisation they would be waiting many hours before making it home.
“Last night she said, ‘Oh baby I feel so down’,” The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas sang to a euphoric crowd of Splendour in the Grass attendees just before midnight on Saturday, but he couldn’t have predicted how the opening lines of one of the band’s most iconic songs would summarise the feelings of thousands caught up in a logistical nightmare as they tried to get home after his set.
Immediately, massive queues started to form as the festival site emptied and revellers, exhausted after a full day of battling the mud, tried to get back to their off-site accommodation. The bus service was scheduled to finish at 2am, but even at 4am thousands of people remained in queues.The Sydney Morning Heraldspoke to a number of festivalgoers who were waiting for buses until 6am, and didn’t make it back to their beds until 7am, well after the sun had risen.
The issue seems to have been exacerbated by the fact that buses had to be redirected to transport campers to a new, pop-up camping site at Byron Event Farms after on-site camping areas were flooded on Thursday night.“Our event site closes at 2am and 90 per cent of our bus patrons were offsite by 3:30am, like it was in 2019. Unfortunately, some of our Tweed routes experienced extended delays due to bus driver shortages. We estimate that approx. 1000 people were affected,” the statement said.
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