EscapeE's: What sort of ecstasy do package tour ravers seek?

"A tan doesn't mean that much to me. We didn't come here for a sun-tan. We came here for seven nights of hard core music"  [Alan].

"I came over to get drunk"  [Rab].

"Dancin', drink and drugs. What else is a holiday for?" [Jackie]

"For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of 'be drunk and be happy', kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts." (Arthur Seaton, hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Sillitoe, 1958, p. 9)

Introduction

Research methodologists conventionally concentrate on every aspect of the research setting bar one - its relative pleasurability. Others quiz shop-floor workers, cross-examine prisoners, question drug addicts, or corner politicians. We, essentially, went on holiday. Armed with clip-boards, questionnaires, tape-recorders, yes; but also, and unusually for researchers, with sun cream, swim suits and holiday money. For in September 1995 we accompanied 203 ravers on a package holiday in a Mediterranean island resort famous for its acid-house music to see what truth there was, if any, in the regular tabloid newspaper stories of endless vacational sun, sea, sand and sex. How so?

Against a background of inordinate success in containing the spread of the HIV virus in the Greater Glasgow area, the Health Board had become increasingly concerned that trips undertaken by local inhabitants outwith the area might unwittingly open windows of infection which could later be spread locally. It was also recognised that the gradual growth of relatively cheap package holidays to hot Mediterranean resorts opened another, quite different risk to fair-skinned Scots: sun-burn today, and expensive and hard to treat skin cancer tomorrow.

Initial prevention campaigns had concentrated on offering advice (together with condoms and sun cream) to those departing Glasgow airport in the summer months of previous years. In 1995, however, the Health Board decided actively to research the activities of holidaymakers when they were there, rather than before they went, or after they returned.

Our main quantitative findings have been reported elsewhere (Elliott, et al., 1998). Some 160 of the 203 ravers departing from Glasgow airport completed a detailed questionnaire at the end of their week's holiday, in addition to a short one, focusing on their expectations, on the outward flight. This initial one collected information on the frequency with which they expected to take drugs, drink alcohol, have sex, and get sun-burned. The second one was designed to assess the degree to which reality matched expectations.

During the week we all spent there, the research team involved themselves in as much participant observation as decorum permitted in order to understand, as much as possible, what it meant to be a raver on holiday. Although unprotected sexual activity was an important one of several health concerns that the Health Board had, the whole daily round of vacational life (and not merely life when its pants were around its ankles) was the focus of observation and enquiry. Thus, the relative significance of various activities was determined by the observed: not by the observers.

Two months or so after return, this group was followed up at a reunion rave at the rave club that had been the principal source of recruitment to the original package holiday. Of the 90 that were interviewed then (using a similar questionnaire to that originally administered, but, since it was now November, deleting the questions relating to the frequency of being sun burned the previous week), 47 had completed the first questionnaire.

In brief, it was discovered that a significantly greater number of those on holiday reported using alcohol (91%) and ecstasy (77%), compared with 69% and 63% respectively of those questioned back at home. Approximately half of those who had sex with new partners whilst on holiday (and at home) used condoms. Of those on holiday, 45% reported sickness and diarrhoea compared with 23% at home. Finally, 49% reported being sunburnt when on holiday.

Contrary to the stereotype, however, members of this group were less likely to have sex when on holiday than when at home (50% did when on holiday, but 67% did when at home), and also had fewer sexual partners on holiday than at home. Indeed, overall, although the use of alcohol and drugs was greater when on holiday than at home, the differences hardly lend weight to the much touted media images of such vacations being endless orgies of hedonistic consumption and indulgence.

This chapter tries to put some flesh on these bare quantitative bones, specifically by using materials gathered in a small number of tape-recorded qualitative interviews which were undertaken with 30 of the ravers whilst they were on holiday. The data contained therein reveal that respondents wanted even more drugs, but they were thwarted by circumstances encountered on holiday. They might have preferred to drink water, but sometimes switched to alcohol because of the price parity between the two. They did seek sexual encounters, but often failed. They were ill more often, and although this was associated with over indulgence, it also included accidents, primarily when respondents were intoxicated.