Do big festivals at an organised event

When a festival takes over a whole city, Harry’s approach is to see both sides: walk the streets for the unfiltered version, then move to a ticketed organised event for the main celebration. He was told beforehand that organised events are better than simply roaming, and found that to be right — without giving up the street experience entirely.

How Harry applies it

At Holi in Delhi he started on the streets of Old Delhi, where the festival is an open paint fight and, as he’d been warned, tourists are singled out. After strangers began asking for money and two men followed his group for at least ten minutes, he moved on to the ticketed party in New Delhi. That was where he found the celebration he’d come for — a packed floor, all ages, and no bad atmosphere — for an entry fee of around 3,000 (from video – unverified).

Demonstrated in

• Celebrating Holi in India with Locals
• Things Got Out of Hand at Rio Carnival 🇧🇷 — the same structure at a much larger scale, and the reason this page has two entries rather than one. Carnival in Rio is the two halves: unplanned street blocos that start at 6am, run over each other all day and are found by word of mouth, and the ticketed Sambadrome at night — a purpose-built parade ground from 1984 where samba schools compete in front of up to 90,000 people. Harry does both on the same day and treats neither as a substitute for the other.