5 Best Naked Festivals

The first thing to remember is that this is ‘pants’ in the American sense, so don’t go whipping off your underwear before you get the Tube, it will probably end in prison. Keeping your underwear firmly on, you can join the other wacky travellers spicing up the commute, following in the bare footsteps of New York ‘prank collective’ Improv Everywhere, which started the tradition 15 years ago before going on to encourage others to join them on the same day each year in cities across the globe.

Forget London 2012, let the real games begin. Resurrected after a five year hiatus, this once-annual sports day on a nudist beach on Australia’s sunny south coast will see competitors going au naturel before competing in events such as the naked marathon, the best bum treasure hunt, water balloon throwing and the rather frightening sounding Tug O’ War Sack Race.

You may have to travel a little farther afield for this one, but the delightfully named Naked Ski Pig Festival is full of all sorts of bizarrely decorated half-naked people speeding down the pistes.

Want to experience the freedom of stripping off but too shy about other people seeing you in your birthday suit? Well, you could always do it in a dark tunnel. Not in a creepy, stalker kind of way, but in an organised, everybody’s-doing-it-so-it’s-fine kind of way. Every year, around 100 brave souls strip off and run through The Homer Tunnel, the drain-like 1.2km granite tunnel through the mountains that leads to the beautiful Milford Sound. The sight that awaits is certainly worth it.

Fancy a festival with a difference? Maybe you yearn to run naked in a crowd of strangers without getting arrested for streaking? The Roskilde Festival offers exhibitionists everywhere the freedom to run around in the nip during the yearly Naked Run – a fantastic festival tradition on the go since 1999.