Rave From Hell
Depraved Dance and Drug in the Jungle of Tulum
Article by Hank Bedingfield, art by Alex Wollinka
The Tuluminati, a wandering flock of serial over-payers and plastic surgery addicts, dance and fuck in the Mayan jungle for a 12-hour, nine-to-nine, EDM-fueled binge. Undisclosed locations, aimless shuttles, buckets of cocaine, and the hired paramilitary supplying it: welcome to Set Underground, the monthly organizers of raves and all things illicit for this nomadic horde of depravity.
I was drawn from my comfort zone into the world of EDM and jungle raves by pure naivete, woefully unaware that a night of dancing and good times was far from my reach.
After a hastily wired transaction of just under $100, I wandered from my Airbnb to a WhatsApp location where my night was set to begin. An anonymous number provided it to me upon the purchase of my ticket. A mile on foot from the center of Tulum to the supermarket and I’d be on a shuttle to the jungle, ready to dance, sweat, and drug myself into a frenzy for the acclaimed underground cenote rave. I stumbled, drunkenly, into something much more vile and cruel: the dark, illicitly trafficked underbelly of international rave culture. I was a lightweight and a fool, completely naive to the ugly surreality of this operation.
The vans were packed with giddy Europeans, each sweating out their own combination of MDMA, LSD, booze, weed, and enough cocaine to make Joe Biden lucid, at least in appearance.
The driver was silent and the shuttle was tense with an awkward anticipation of the night to come; there was questioning and concerned jabbering in a handful of languages I could barely make out.
The van rumbled off, out of town and out of service, stabbing its way through the jungle. After two or three unmarked exits, we finally arrived at the venue.
Past paramilitary checkpoints, the exchange of walkie-talkie commands, and a few lonely fireside, gun-toting mercenaries, we had finally made it.
A couple of pat downs later and the paranoia was rearing at me already, that Fear and Loathing I’d read about but only felt a number of times. I had to strap in and keep things level as the jungle and my strange company traced in and out before me, chasing after a stray puppy in a drug-fueled frenzy, and the ground dropped, tipped, and reappeared at random.
What a cruel trap I’d walked into. Checking my phone was no help—a reminder that without service, in the middle of a Mexican jungle, I was doomed to the swine. I had to break for the bar if I was to beat back the evil tonight. And that’s what I did.
I weaved through mermaid body suits, mesh dresses, near-plastic faces, and surgically altered and enhanced everything-you-can-imagine, with a wonky gait and rabid stare. I knew I had been taken to a land where I was woefully outmatched.
I had no idea where I was but looking around, I was suddenly surrounded by the disciples of Coachella and Burning Man, the Aspen-goers, the Hamptons-owners, the cocaine lovers.
And there was plenty of cocaine. Duffle bags full of it, served out in overpriced dime bags by the same security force that patted me down and lingered a little too long around my inner thigh. The paramilitary mercenaries were conveniently monopolizing the market and taking full advantage of the money around them. Drugs were everywhere, music was loud and psychedelic, and appropriative Mayan-esque patterns illuminated the cenote which we circled and the jungle backdrop behind.
I blew 60 USD immediately on Palomas, desperately trying to ground myself in the comfort of a reliable drunkness. That comfort would elude me, no match for the oppressive forces already spinning my head. I was truly forlorn. The paranoid reality of glitter, house-music, and the loosely-tied kimonos of those around me would soon slap me in the face and leave me crying for my bed as I stumbled home.
A couple of hours in that thick, perverse dream and I’d had it. Though I had experienced one beautiful moment with a potato-shaped Miami contractor in his mid-thirties tweaking off of molly, sheets of sweat pouring from his face as he babbled unintelligibly. He gifted me a vape and darted off in some light up, hype-beast style mask (not COVID-related) with a parting spew about his need to dance.
Terror and disgust gripped me like a vice. I, at the same time, realized the dire weight of my situation. I’d left on a shuttle from a grocery store to an unknown location in the middle of the jungle where I now stood with $20 to my name, in a country an unknown number of miles from home. What would my mother think? How would I get home?
As influencers and their humanoid folk poured in, surrounding me, I clawed for a way out. I was a fish swimming upstream and the current of nouveau riche millennials was crushing, inescapable, and purely repulsive. I circled the venue for an exit, clawing at humid air and swatting away the hype-beasts of the night, trapped by the same vendors and faces.
There was no exit.
Instead, where the boujee and depraved funneled in, I hailed a security guard while foaming at the mouth and begging to be led to the shuttle that had dropped me off so easily.
They spoke no English, and through my broken Spanish, I pleaded with audible desperation.
“I have no money. I won’t be taken to an ATM. I’m not in the crowd here; I’m not enjoying the Colombian sugar or $20 joints. I’m a man who doesn’t belong here and can’t afford to get out.”
A taxi appeared and offered me a $50 ride. Even in my state of total, desperate vulnerability, I wouldn’t fall for such blatant extortion.
After a few angry exchanges, the taxi man realized I wasn’t the money pit he was promised and I returned to the strung-out and disinterested security guard in search of a more economically-feasible alternative.
After much waiting and confusion, one appeared. As the rusted-out minivan pulled up, so did the panic, and I realized the cab might’ve been a better call, at any cost.
I knew now what kind of a racket I had foolishly walked into — take the rich tourists from a shuttle in town and drop them in the middle of the jungle with no way back except some sleazy taxis. Whoever had planned this event was weaponizing chaos and exploiting the drug-riddled and vacation-happy. I couldn’t blame them. I would also be smiling if I were fleasing such an undeserving and undesirable crowd.
But for me, someone with a light wallet, apparently out-dated fashion, and too few drugs in my system to last till sunrise, I was far from home and stranded.
The van before me was a garbage truck of sorts, packed with the unlucky, financially unendowed, and the incoherently drunk. My only company, hastily shoved into this glorified minivan, couldn’t support his own weight or say his name. His personhood was rapidly evaporating and his cheery friends, eager to rejoin the party, dumped him into the van without a parting word. God knows where he ended up.
Stepping in, the van was perfectly casted for a True Crime podcast. My new driver was fat and drooling, with a Big Gulp equivalent in his holster. He slurred a spit-blurred dialect into a tightly clutched radio as I climbed into his dilapidated minivan. 1920s lullabies from the staticy CD he popped in filled my ears and I knew I was fucked. This was the end. Forget about the Tuluminati, I was now destined to end up in this man’s basement until the end of eternity.
The doors clicked and locked.
After making it only a couple hundred feet down the dirt road, a panic set in and I demanded that the doors be unlocked. It couldn’t be the end for me. I got out of that van for good. And with a strange soul and full head, I knew exactly the kind of nightmare I’d be subjected to if I hadn’t, and the horrors that would likely befall the semi-conscious partner I had to leave behind.
So I went back to cry and plead, with no money, no backing, and a name worth forgetting, desperate to get back to the town from which I had kidnapped myself.
Eventually, sufficiently exhausted by my ranting, one kind mercenary security guard called a waiting shuttle, exchanged hasty words with the driver, and gestured me on. I took the ride and found my way home.
I collapsed onto my bed, paralized by equal parts shock and fear. Life seemed beautiful and violently ephemeral all at once. Finally emancipated from the horrible comedown, I vowed never to dance with such swine again.
What did I learn? What’s the moral here? The world is uglier than you can imagine and the closest thing to reality are the nightmares we write off as fiction. EDM just isn’t my kind of music.