On the Road

January

February

March
Holi
Holi is one of those festivals where all is allowed.

April
Thai Water Fights

May

June
Glastonbury Festival – Always on or around the summer solstice, Glastonbury is an institution in the English underground scene, becoming by far and away the largest music festival in the country. Always with an eye to promoting left wing and alternative movements, it costs a bomb to get in and so there’s a rich tradition of looking for a hole in the fence. Inside the music, workshops and entertainment goes on for 3 days, often through driving rain and thick mud.

July

August
Burning Man Festival – the world’s greatest counterculture event. Hug art installations in Black Rock Nevada Desert, some of the world’s most talented, freakiest people are to be found here in a community which lasts a week and culminates in the burning of a huge wooden effigy of a giant man. Lots of drugs, sex, art and dancing naked.

European Rainbow Gathering – the big Rainbow event which takes place in a different European country each year, depending on where the vision council is directed by the Great Spirit, hee, hee! Hippies, hippies and more hippies, really lots of fun for a month in nature, learning how to coexist with each other.

September

October
The Oktoberfest in Munich, Bafaria – Beer, beer and more strong, dark German beer in the international piss-up to end all drunken parties. A huge event which draws millions of people each year. The beers are varied, strong and fairly cheap (7 euros a litre in 2006) and you can soak up the alcohol with cheese noodles or dead animals made into sausages.
Day of the Dead, Guatemala and Mexico
Halloween, San Francisco

November
Pushkar Camel Fair
Pushkar is a town in Rajastaan, India and every November anyone who owns a camel or who smells like one come together to trade, drink chai and get spat on by the irritable beasts. The town is full of camels, camel drivers and tourists looking for camels – which they find rather quickly. Hugely touristic but also quite intense and anarchic, worth the experience if you can arrive early and find somewhere calm to stay.

Guy Fawkes Day, Lewes, England
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot..”
This day is celebrated with a night full of fireworks and bonfires to celebrate the entry of the only man to ever enter parliament with honest intentions – to blow the whole thing up. The collaborators, including poor Guy Fawkes, were tortured and burnt or executed for daring to challenge the right of the inbred aristocracy to bleed the masses dry.
Lewes is a small town near Brighton in the south of England and is one of the coolest places to pass Bonfire Night – the streets are full of flames and smoke and whilst it can get a bit wild with people letting off their own arsenal of rockets and bangers, the official display will blow you away.

The Cannabis Cup, Amsterdam – for a couple of hundred Euros you can become a judge at the infamous marijuana competition and pass your vote on the various strains of hashish and marijuana that hopeful growers are presenting as the best smokes in the world.

December
Sufi Festival in Konya, Turkey – Whirling dervishes, Sufi poetry and mystical meetings of esoteric Muslims. Mainly a male affair, there are evening where everyone holds hands and sways in mystical union to traditional Sufi music.

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