A celebration of love and colour, the Holi Festival is one of the biggest and most significant festivals in the Hindu religion. Taking place over two days in spring, the festival celebrates colour, love, fertility and the triumph of good versus evil. This vibrant and joyful festival sees celebrants take to the streets and throw different colours all over each other, with each colour symbolising its own meaning, such as red for love, green for new beginnings and blue for the Hindu God Krishna.

Celebrated in all over Thailand, Loi Krathong is quite possibly one of the nation’s most beautiful and magical festivals. Held in November every year, the festival sees hundreds of people gather together around lakes, rivers, beaches and canals to pay their respects by making a wish and release it upon a floating lantern of candles, flowers and incense sticks, known as a ‘krathong’, across the water. In Chiang Mai however, people light up paper lanterns and release them up into the night sky, creating a truly magical sight. Thai people believe that in releasing these floating or flying lanterns, they are letting go of bad luck and making way for good fortune to come into their lives in the coming year.

Held annually in the beautiful city of Venice, Carnival, or Carnevale, is one of Italy’s biggest and most famous celebrations, attracting up to three million visitors every year. With a history dating as far back as the 12th century, the festival takes place, in the days leading up to the Christian celebration of Lent, during which time mask-clad and costumed celebrants party through the cobble-stoned streets of Venice. There’s plenty going on during the two-week celebration, including street fairs and performances and candle-lit boat parades, and concluding with the spectacular Mascheranda Grand Ball, held inside a stunning candlelit palace overlooking the Grand Canal.

What started out as a few friends burning a wooden figure on a beach in San Francisco in 1986, has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest and most famous art and culture events. Held in a temporary, purpose-built “city” in the Black Rock Desert, 160 kilometres north of Reno, Nevada, Burning Man is a celebration of community, inclusion, art and self-expression, based on ten main principles including civic responsibility, decommodification, participation and leaving no trace. Attracting nearly 70,000 “burners” including a big celebrity following, the annual festival runs from the last Sunday in August to the first Monday of September. Participants express their creativity through performance, interactive sculpture, mutant vehicles, costumes and other art forms inspired by the yearly theme, and instead of cash and vendors, everyone relies on an economy of gift exchange in order to survive life in the desert for one week. The highlight event of the festival is the traditional ritual of burning “The Man”, an enormous wooden sculpture set on fire in a massive party.

Get ready to be razzled and dazzled at what is considered to be the biggest festival in the world. Around two million people descent on the streets for The Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, held every year to mark the beginning of Lent, in a mind-blowing spectacle of elaborate parading floats, music and dancing from more than 200 local Samba schools. The city becomes a giant party of features, sequins and sparkles, with parades, balls and street festivals happening all throughout Rio and more than 300 “bandas”, or bands, performing at any one time. With the high tempo beats and rhythms of Brazilian music taking over the city, the energy is infectious and anyone can participate in the street festivals and parties, known as “blocos”.

This ten-day festival of art, music, culture and food is a celebration of the winter solstice, with many of its events taking place at night. It is the winter version of Hobart’s MONA FOMA (Museum of Old and New Art: Festival of Music and Art, often referred to as MOFO for short) and controversially, has a much darker edge to it, with pagan and even satanic undertones, such as the closing night party called “Satanalia”. However, there are plenty of wonderful events during the festival that celebrate light, sounds and fire, as well as fun nude swim in the Derwent River at dawn for the brave hearted. Another highlight of the festival is the decadent Dark MOFO Winter Feast which runs for three nights, where thousands of festival goers cram into a large dining hall and indulge in delicious meals and local food stalls.

The world’s greatest and most famous tomato battle, La Tomatina has been taking place in the Valencian town of Buñol since 1945. On the last Wednesday in August, thousands gather in Plaza del Pueblo, the town square, to throw hundreds of thousands of kilograms of tomatoes at each other, in what is known as the biggest the most epic food fight in the whole world. The fun and chaotic carnage usually goes for about an hour, covering the town square in tomato juice, after which fire trucks hose down the streets as well as the participants. Due to the acidity of the tomato juice, the streets end up being super clean.

The Day of the Dead is a traditional Mexican holiday, which honours and celebrates the spirit of loved ones that have passed. Children and infants that have passed are honoured on 1 November and adults, on 2 November, and it is believed that on these two days the border between the spirit world and living world is at its thinnest, so the dead come to visit those they’ve left behind. Friends and families come together to build “ofrendas”, or altars, in their memory, decorating them and their graves with flowers, candles, pictures and brightly coloured ceramic skulls. They also leave offerings of the departed’s favourite food and beverages. While the theme may be about death, the tone is anything but sombre. Instead, it is an explosion of colour, food, costumes, face-painting and festivities, as people come together to celebrate life, love and beautiful memories.

Participants dressed as Vikings burn their viking galley ship at the culmination of the annual Up Helly Aa festival in Lerwick, Shetland Islands, on January 31, 2017. Up Helly Aa celebrates the influence of the Scandinavian Vikings in the Shetland Islands and culminates with up to 1,000 ‘guizers’ (men in costume) throwing flaming torches into their Viking longboat and setting it alight later in the evening.

Steeped in history and tradition, the flamboyant New Orleans Mardis Gras is one giant party of music, festivities, performances, elaborate costumes and float-filled parades over a two-week period in the lead up to Lent. The parades are organised by social clubs called “krewes”, and a long time tradition is for float riders to throw items such as strings of beads, krewe doubloons (medallions), cups, and small toys. Most parades occur down Bourbon Street, in the city’s famous French Quarter, but many events, parties and balls happen all throughout New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana communities.

Held every year in Munich, Oktoberfest is the world’s biggest “Volksfest” (folk festival of beer and travelling funfair), with more than six million people attending from all over the world. An important part of Bavarian culture, Oktoberfest had its beginning as a commemoration of the marriage between Prince Ludwig and Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen, which the citizens of Munich celebrated on the Theresienwiese (Theresa’s Fields). Oktoberfest is still held here at the “Wies’n”, as it is called by locals, and includes plenty of joyful festivities, traditional Bavarian costume of dirndl dresses and lederhosen, giant festival tents, Bavarian brass band music, gun salutes, food and of course, a lot of Bavarian beer drinking – but only if it was made in one of the six traditional Munich-based breweries.