Burning Man: An insider’s guide to surviving your first burn

Burning Man, as your most woke friends will tell you, is not a festival. It’s a community, a temporary city, a dusty sesh-gremlin caliphate.

This attitude obviously wouldn’t fly if it took place in a greenfield near Woking, but because it’s in Nevada, in an impossibly vast desert setting, all things seem possible – even the suspension of your limey, hoity-toity cynicism.

Your impression of “Burners” on the basis of their excruciating accounts of their first “Burn” may be that they’re all participating in some kind of psychedelic Tough Mudder. In truth, Burning Man is equal parts construction, bar work and cycling, thanks to a set of rules that demand you are self-sufficient and provide generously for everyone.

This is the locus from which the festival-as-lifestyle concept stems. You may think that Glastonbury is high maintenance for demanding that festival-goers recycle their cups and piss in actual toilets, rather than in the hedgerows.

Once you’ve experienced Burning Man’s fastidious last day of deconstructing the entire camp and forensically scouring the desert floor for fragments of “MOOP” (Matter Out of Place), the act of even discarding your rubbish will seem impossibly indulgent.

Burning Man is not the kind of place where you can abandon your tent on Monday morning and be curled up in bed within three hours. It’s in a desert – a real desert, with dust storms, punishing heat and freezing mornings. It’s also eight days long.

And you’re going to have to take absolutely everything you need with you, because money doesn’t work there. Here is an insider’s guide to surviving your first burn.

THERE ARE RULES

You may be cynical of the hedonic possibilities of a festival that comes with a rule book, but in a place where no money changes hands, you kind of need to set the terms. Burning Man’s 10 principles turn out to be a very good way of forging a sense of communal responsibility, personal accountability and appreciation for others – a kind of 12 Rules For Life for people on disco biscuits.

For example: cleaning up after yourself (“Leaving No Trace”), doing nice things for others (“Gifting”), saying hello to the neighbours (“Participation”), standing up straight with your shoulders back (”radical self-reliance”) and taking the bins out (”Civic responsibility”).

Obviously nobody wants to be reminded of David Cameron while they’re at Burning Man (that’s why you didn’t go to Wilderness this year) but isn’t this the Big Society he dreamed of? Just kidding: Burning Man is neither a libertarian nor luxury communist Utopia; it’s essentially a psychedelic Girl Guides, where the lemonade is spiked and the badges are nipple pasties.

YOU WILL QUEUE

The privilege of Burning Man’s mantra of “radical self-reliance” begins with a journey to the gate that takes several hours in a long convoy of cars. Chances are you’ll get there after nightfall and be faced with one of the most memorable festival entrances around: a dark, barren landscape punctuated by the belch of flames from art cars and a hostile welcoming party who make you get on the floor and roll around in the dust.

The initiation process is actually weirdly intimidating, a bit like a Sunday night at Reading festival. It’s just the conditioning you need to prepare you for the site itself.

YOU WILL NEED TO JOIN A CAMP

People – especially people from the UK – don’t go to Burning Man by themselves. They stay in pre-arranged camps that spend months in the run-up to Burning Man organising the logistics of building huge bars in the desert from the rusty remains of whatever survived last year’s event to sit in a Reno, Nevada lock-up.

In theory you could go to burning man without being a part of a camp. You could live on cereal bars for a week, catch almost no sleep in your sweltering tent and ration your alcohol stores. But you’ll rightly feel like a bit of a sponger, because the whole point of going is to give something back to your fellow ‘burners’ – some free food, alcohol or entertainment.

In this temporary climate of Stakhanovite hedonism you will actually crave a job, grounding among familiar faces, and somebody to give you cold brew in the mornings and pickles in the afternoon.

YES, THERE ARE ORGIES

Upon your return, all anybody will be interested in is whether you went to any orgies. The obvious way to deal with this is to actually go to one of the orgy tents or domes. Participation is encouraged, but this will depend entirely on whether your repressed British sexuality will allow you to.

The final test of any liberal is how they react to seeing their best friend of 10 years getting it on enthusiastically with a gurning man with a fractal tattoo of a wolf, amid a mise-en-scène of rutting strangers.