大象传媒

It all starts with one person climbing up a greasy wooden pole to touch a ham. Really. That's the touchpaper moment for La Tomatina, the world's largest food fight. Held every year, on the last Wednesday of August, in the town of Buñol near Valencia, the festival is attended by 20,000 people – it used to be over twice that until a limit was put on the revelry.

The festival started in earnest in 1946 as a parody of an incident the year before when food was thrown in actual anger. It was banned just over a decade later, but protestors staged a funeral for a tomato as part of the action to resurrect it!

In one previous event, the participants got through 145,000 kilos of tomatoes, worth £320,000.

"Useful advice," says Iszi, "includes wearing closed shoes and old clothes that you don't mind throwing away. And if you want to take photos, make sure your camera is waterproof."

Crop Over Festival, Barbados

With Rihanna as its ambassador and a dress code of feathers, gemstones and flesh, Barbados Crop Over Festival is the coolest harvest festival in the world.

The festival runs over three whole months in Barbados' capital Bridgetown, attracting 100,000 visitors from all over the world to enjoy music, art and food. Highly recommended to Shaun and Iszi by comedian Sikisa, it's a celebratory affair today, but has its roots in the slave trade and sugar harvest, which was – and still is – a perilous activity.

As Iszi says, "back in the 17th Century the celebration was less 'Hey, we've got a nice harvest,' and more ‘Hey, we survived.'" Thankfully, the modern-day incarnation is a world away from the conditions it started in.

One event that would not actually function without adverse weather is Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in the province of Heilongjiang in northeast China. Held in early January and running til the end of February, festival-goers can expect sub-zero temperatures thanks to icy winds blowing from Siberia.

Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival

However, if you can brave the chill, you can wonder at ice sculptures dotted around the city, and, as Iszi notes, "dramatic life-sized ice buildings, huge snow sculptures and beautiful ice lanterns carved from the chunks of the frozen Songhua River."

Burning Man, Nevada, USA

Styled as a festival of community, art, self-expression and self-reliance (and also pounding dance music), Burning Man centres around a contemporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

It was born as the ultimate bohemian experience, although it is now favoured by "tech bros and social influencers," as Shaun says, and so, arguably, as much a representation of 'The Man' as the effigy burned on the festival's penultimate night. However, the festival retains an offbeat vibe - it’s entirely cashless for a start, and 'burners' (as attendees are known) have to bring their own water to wash in.

As Iszi explains, "there is a line where you have to wash other people. So you go in and somebody will soap you, another person will scrub you, and then you get washed and then you join the line to scrub… that's not the most encouraging facial."

You can hear more about Shaun and Iszi's recommendations for festivals worth visiting by listening to the Mini Guide in full here.

In their Animal Magic Mini Guide, Shaun and Iszi go on a whirlwind tour of wildlife, including getting up close with penguins on Boulders Beach in Cape Town, thanks to a tip from Michaela Strachan, and some esteemed and venerated Galapagos tortoises. Shaun baulks at the idea of swarms of flies above Lake Malawi but is intrigued by the mongoose-like Fossa of Madagascar and the swimming pigs of the Bahamas.

Get your trolleys at the ready, as you will be overloaded with bounty from the examples of markets featured in Shopper's Paradise. These bustling consumer havens include the long and winding flea market of La Grande Braderie de Lille, France, the nomadic Masai Market in Nairobi in Kenya and the canal-based Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, Thailand. If you’re after a kind of potpourri of weirdness, then The Witches’ Market in Le Paz, Bolivia might be for you, while there are nocturnal treasures to be found in the celebrated night markets of Taipei, Taiwan and Carnac, France.

In Offbeat Art, Shaun and Iszi tap into their creative side with a round-up of some of the world’s buzziest and unconventional art hotspots. Strictly's Janette Manrara recommends the graffiti artist nirvana of Wynwood Walls, Miami, while there's more wall art at the East Side Gallery in Berlin. For intriguing new perspectives, why not try the largest model railway system in the world at Miniatur Wonderland, Hamburg and the world’s biggest sandcastle in Finland’s Sandcastle Lappeenranta, near Lake Saimaa?

Listen to all the other destinations covered in Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny, including new episodes with Rob Delaney and Thomasina Miers, here.