10 of the craziest festivals on this planet

Unless you're a crowd hater there's nothing better than being surrounded by like minded folk in celebration of something you're all passionate about. Festivals can bring some of the best and worst of the human experience but also some of the straight up weirdest. Below is a collection of 10 of the craziest festivals on this here planet we call Earth.

1. El Colacho - The Baby Jumping Festival
About 400 years someone came up with the idea of grown men jumping over newborn babies in the street as a means of cleansing them of evil... Weird right! What's even weirder is that they have done it every years since as part the Catholic Festival of Corpus Christi.

2. Hadaka Matsuri - The Naked Festival
The Japanese festival of Hadaka Matsuri happens a few times a year throughout Japan. The main gist of this festival is that hundreds of Japanese men gather in man sized nappy like loin cloths and hang out... in and amongst the happy wearing men is a secret fully naked guy that supposedly brings good luck if you touch him...

3. Up Helly-Aa: The Fire Festival
Not too disimilar to an average Friday night at Lifelounge (something always ends up on fire) the Up Helly-Aa is a festival all about burning shit. It's actually a Viking tribute in Shetland where everyone dresses up in drag and it culminates around the torching of a 32ft replica of a Viking ship.

4. The Monkey Buffet Festival
Everyone loves a monkey but no one as much as the Thais. For the Monkey Buffet Festival, the Thais create 3 tonne smorgasbord of fruit and tasty treats and they invite around 600 monkeys to run enjoy the feast while they watch...

5. Holi - the Festival of Colours
Like a Sony ad on steroids, the Hindu Festival of Holi involves thousands of people throwing colored powder and water at each other... pretty spectacular to watch. I'm guessing they have a rainbow extraganza of boogars for the following week. Looks like fun though.

6. Cheese Rolling Festival
Really dumb but highly entertaining. This festival is all about grown men rolling a 7 pound wheel of cheese down a super steep hill then running full pelt down the hill after it. As you can imagine everyone eats shit and no one ever catches the cheese ( it apparently can reach speeds of over 100km/hr)

7. Malsenitsa - mass punch on festival
Kind of like Fight Club only bigger. The week before lent in Orthodox countries like Russia, all the men throw on some boxing gloves and beat the living shit out of each other... literally. No rules, just a massive punch on festival.

8. Tunarama - The Tuna Tossing Festival
For the last 45 odd years Tuna fishermen have gathered around Port Lincoln in Australia to throw tuna fish... that's about it. The world record is 37.23 metres.

9. Roswell UFO Festival
A celebration of the "Roswell Incident" where apparently alien life form crashed their flying saucer.  Conspiracy threorists gather and dresses up like aliens and lecture on the truth.

10. La Tomatina
Kind of like a foam party but without the flouro and with a shitload of tomatoes. Actually it'm more like a giant jelly wrestling fest. 30000 tourist gather from all around to the Spanish town of Bunyol to have 250lbs of tomatoes thrown at them for about an hour... Gross.

Check out some photos of these crazy festival to the right of this post. -->


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