Every year, hundreds of people from India’s Uttarakhand state engage in Bagwal, a brutal stone-pelting battle that often leaves dozens with severe injuries that require medical attention.

Bagwal literally means “fight with stones”, so it’s a pretty fitting name for a celebration that’s all about hurling big stones at the opposing side. Four clans gather in the Champawat district of Uttarakhand to take part in the unique event, despite the danger of getting seriously injured by the stones flying through the air. In fact, bloody wounds are the whole point of Bagwal as legend has it that the Hindu deity Barahi struck a deal with humans to rid them of demon invaders in exchange for a sacrifice in the form of blood.

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In Christian countries around the world, the Easter Bunny is a beloved symbol of one of the world’s most popular holidays, but in one New Zealand town, bunnies are such a plague for farmers that locals spend Easter wiping them out.

In New Zealand, rabbits are an introduced species that threatens both the country’s biodiversity and its agriculture. They are essentially pests that have to be culled in order to minimize the damage they cause. The town of Alexandra, in Central Otago, has turned the mass culling of rabbits into an event known as The Great Easter Bunny Hunt, which attracts hundreds of hunters from all over the country. The local Alexandra Lions club has organized the event for the last 25 years, which has become popular both with hunters and the local population, including kids, many of whom take part in the “celebration”.

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The small Indian village of Gummatapura is famous all over the world for its unique way of ending the annual Diwali celebrations – a massive cow dung battle called “Gorehabba”.

Spain has La Tomatina, a famous battle with tomatoes, Italy has the traditional Ivrea Battle of Oranges, and India has Gorehabba, a cow dung battle to end the important Diwali festivities. That may seem like an insult to Indian festivities, but only to those ignorant to the importance and significance of cow dung in Indian culture. It’s held in such high regard that companies use it as an ingredient for beauty products, handcrafted art, and even radiation repelling devices. Some claim it can even ward off the coronavirus… So yes, hurling cow dung at each other is far from disgusting for the dozens who participate in Gorehabba.

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On the fourth Saturday of each January, the dead grass of Mount Wakakusa is set ablaze as part of a unique and impressive festival called Wakakusa Yamayaki (‘Wakakusa Burning Mountain’).

No one known exactly how the tradition of burning an entire 342-metre-high hill in Japan’s Nara Prefecture actually started, but one thing is for certain – it has been around for hundreds of years. Some say it began as a boundary dispute between the two greatest temples of Nara, Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji, sometime during the 18th century. When mediation failed, the entire hill was burned to the ground, although no one quite remembers how that solved anything. Another theory claims that the annual fire originated as a way to eliminate pests and drive away wild boars. Today, it’s just an impressive sight to behold that attracts tourists from all over the world.

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Sports are usually associated with skill and effort, be they physical or mental, but in Vinkensport or vinkenzetting (literally ‘Finch Sitting), a traditional animal sport practiced in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, it’s all about sitting down and listening to birds singing.

In Vinkensport, small cages are lined up in a row about six feet apart on the street. Inside each box is a single male chaffinch whose job is to produce as many bird calls as possible in one hour. Sitting in front of the wooden cages are their owners, the vinkeniers (“finchers”) who tally the bird songs with chalk on a large wooden rod. Each chalk line represents one complete bird call which ends in a characteristic flourish known as a susk-e-wiet. Judges walk along the row of cages to make sure no one cheats. The chaffinch with the most bird calls in an hour is declared the winner. Vinkensport is a very passive sport, some would even call it boring, but it is also a very controversial one.

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Board shoe racing is the traditional sport of the Zhuang people of China’s Gunaxi province, a unique discipline that has three people sharing the same “shoes”, which requires perfect coordination and concentration.

Board shoe racing can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty, when legend has it that a famous heroine of the Xhuang people used it as a way to train soldiers against invading Japanese pirates. The legendary Mrs. Wa used long pieces of wood to teach the men to march together in perfect synchronization, which greatly improved their combat qualities and boosted their fighting spirit, helping them repel the invaders. The traditional sport has been passed on from generation to generation since then.

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The Andler Hillclimb is an annual dirt bike competition that has dirt bikers from around Europe try to reach the top of a treacherous hillside course in Belgium. It’s been held every year for the last two decades, but so far no one has been able to reach the top.

The so-called “impossible climb”, starts out as rough gravel and then switches over to a washboard of rough cliff face designed to throw riders off and send them and their bikes tumbling back down to the base of the hill. It’s not the angle of attack that’s the problem, according to most riders, but the sudden change of ride surface that makes keeping control of the bike and reaching the top so damn hard. Some fly off their bike early during the climb, while others get painfully close the the finish line, but in the end they all succumb to the power of gravity before reaching their goal.

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Every February, on the day before Lent, the small Mexican town of San Juan de la Vega honors its namesake saint with a loud tradition that has come to be known as the Festival of Exploding Hammers.

The origins of this bombastic festival are shrouded in mystery. According to one local story, Juan de la Vega, a wealthy miner and rancher, was aided by San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist) to recover gold stolen by bandits and residents came up with the exploding hammers to loudly commemorate their victory over the outlaws. Another story claims that “San Juanito” the patron saint of the town, was an outlaw himself, a sort of Mexican Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and that the today’s celebration is a reenactment of the fight between San Juanito and the local dons. Whatever the real origin may be, the explosive tradition is so popular in San Juan de la Vega that locals will risk life and limb to keep it going.

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DELO, a small German company specializing in industrial adhesives, recently set a new Guinness Record after successfully suspending a 17-tonne-truck in the air for an hour using only super-strong glue.

In an attempt to show that it produces the world’s strongest adhesives, Bavaria-based company DELO set out to lift a 17.5 tonne truck one meter above ground using only 3 grams of a very strong glue developed specifically for this event. They used an industrial crane and four aluminum cylinders with a cover surface of of 3.5 cm (the diameter of a standard soda can) bonded to the wheels of the truck with a few drops of high-temperature-resistant DELO MONOPOX adhesive. The truck hung in the air for a full hour, thus breaking the previous record of 16.09 tonnes.

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Kayabuki no Sato, a small hamlet in Kyoto famous for its traditional thatched roof houses, features a concealed sprinkler system that turns the whole place into a water fountain.

Known as Miyama’s Thatched Village, Kayabuki no Sato has a higher percentage of thatched roof farmhouses than any other place in Japan. This makes it very popular with tourists, who love walking among the over 40 traditional thatched roof abodes and even spending the night in one of them, but also very vulnerable to fire. Local officials realized this in the year 2000, when a fire burned down the archive center, so apart from asking people to be vigilant at all times, they decided to install a special sprinkler system to cover the whole hamlet. They test it twice a year, usually in May and December, and people from all over Japan and beyond come to see the powerful sprinklers in action.

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Aspiring seagull imitators from all over Europe recently gathered in the Belgian town of Adinkerke to take part in the first European Gull Screeching Championship.

The wacky event took place in a local pub and required competitors to channel their inner gull, both vocally and physically. While the emphasis of the competition was on the sound produced by participants, with a maximum of 15 points being awarded for the best screeching sounds, participants could also score up to 5 points by putting on a proper performance. Some just flapped their arms in a gull-like manner, others wore seagull-style beaks on top of their heads, and a few actually wore gull costumes to impress the judges. It all sounds silly, but the Gull Screeching Championship actually has a serious goal.

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The Russian city of Krasknoyask recently hosted the country’s first ever amateur face-slapping championship, which had participants slap each other across the face until one of them got knocked out.

The controversial event was held during the Siberian Power Show, a popular sports show held in Krasnoyarsk on March 16 and 17. A similar competition took place last year, in Moscow, but it featured only professional athletes competing for the unofficial title of most heavy-handed face slapper. This time, organizers decided to give amateurs the chance to prove themselves, so anyone willing to engage in some manly face slapping was invited to sign up. Most of the participants were just random guys who had come to attend the power show and decided to try something new. It’s fair to say that some of them didn’t know the world of pain they would be experiencing at the hands of a mountain of a man…

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Sixteen brave runners recently gathered in the Russian village of Oymyakon, also known as the world’s pole of cold,  to compete in the coldest official race in history.

Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with temperatures constantly dropping to under -50 degrees Celsius in winter time. This place is so cold that a person’s unprotected face can suffer frostbite in a matter of seconds, and sometimes the mercury in thermometers freezes. Oymyakon can barely be called inhabitable, let alone suitable for a marathon, and yet at the beginning of this year, 16 runners gathered here to take part in a series of extreme races.

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Horse races are usually all about speed, but in Ban’ei, a form of horse racing unique to the Japanese island of Hokkaidō, it’s strength and stamina that matter most.

Ban’ei race horses, also known as ‘banba’, are very different from the fast thoroughbreds we associate with horse racing. They can weigh up to 1,200 kilograms and are more than twice the size of the small dosanko horses native to Hokkaidō. These horses are crossbred descendants of workhorses imported from France and Belgium at the end of the 19th century to help farmers work their land, and are now considered a Japanese breed in their own right. Depending on their size, these strong animals can pull up to a ton of weight, and that’s exactly the kind of strength required to win the world’s slowest horse race.

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Most people wouldn’t dare touch a scorpion for all the money in the world, but in one small Indian village, people actually seek out the poisonous arachnids and put them on their faces, or eve in their mouths, as part of a worshiping ritual.

Every year, on Naga Panchami, when most of India worships the snake god, the people of Kandakoor, about 20 kilometers from Yadgir, in the state of Karnataka, worship their Scorpion Goddess, Kondammai. Men and women, children and the elderly, all queue to go up a nearby hill called Chellina Betta (Scorpion Hill) and reach an idol of Kondammai, to which they offer sarees, coconuts and oil, and pray for good health and prosperity. After this ritual is completed, everyone starts looking for scorpions to play with.

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