I recently returned from a week in Trinidad & Tobago. Before you look outside at the wintry weather and curse me for basking in the warmth of the Caribbean, let me tell you that it was not all bath-warm water and coral beaches. Some of it was, I won’t lie, but I was there for Carnival. Trinidadians take their Carnival seriously and their celebration is the largest in the Caribbean—and one of the biggest and wildest in the world. Hmm, that doesn’t seem to be eliciting much pity from you either. Understandable, I suppose, but you are also looking at it with a chilly and rested eye. Carnival is all about sleep-deprivation. They say that when Trinidadians are not celebrating Carnival, they spend their time talking about how great last year’s party was, or how great next year’s is going to be. They’re not kidding; I’ve never seen people dance, drink, party, and generally revel in an event like Trinis at Carnival.

Americans tend to think of themselves as pretty fun-loving. Clearly, we like to party and celebrate, getting together with friends and family. Personally, I like to think I can hold my own with just about anyone when it comes to having a good time. However, I know that when I haven’t slept enough or if I’m just made uncomfortable by heat or cold or hunger, I’ll become a miserable mess and just want to go home. So, when offered the opportunity to take part in the biggest party in the most conducive party climate in the world, I jumped at the chance to prove myself.

I’d already been on the island three days when Sunday came around. Sunday before Carnival is a big deal as Sunday night signals the semi-official start to the festivities. There are parties all week the previous week—from your typical all-you-can-drink, live music dance party inside a stadium (the band went on at midnight), to the Soca Monarch show in the cricket oval, or even Panorama, a steel pan competition in which teams of dozens of steel pan drummers move in perfect synchronicity—but it’s all just a warm-up. I woke up around 7:00 Sunday morning and went off to Maracas Bay, a glorious beach hemmed by high lush hills, skirted by creaking palm trees, and barraged with water whose balmy temperature didn’t shock me, but whose rough surf impressed me and reminded me of thoughtless mid-Atlantic waves. After several hours of imitating a rag doll in the water, my compatriots and I headed back to Port-of-Spain to watch the Super Bowl. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be watching TV while in such a tropical locale, or talking about football on a travel blog… no, who am I kidding? I lost years off my life, but emerged victorious and celebrated with various local Trinidadians who happened to love the Giants, and my fellow travelers (mostly Brits, ironically) with a round of Macallan 12 which—heartbreakingly—had to be consumed immediately so as not to miss a bus back home. Chugging expensive scotch with Brits and Trinis in celebration of the Giants is not where this night gets weird.

Back at our hotel, we simply stayed up after the game, sampling countless batches of the locally brewed Stag beer. The decision to stay up was not a difficult one as we had a 2:15am wake up call on Monday, a mere three hours away. The Monday of Carnival is something call j’ouvert (zhoo-VAY), short for jour ouvert, or “opening day.” This consists of donning clothes you don’t care about, red devil horns (or some variety of costume), arming yourself with paint, and meeting around 3:00am with hundreds of other lunatics. As you mill about in the street in the middle of the city, tractor trailers built of speakers blast the year’s carnival Soca music. It doesn’t take long for the crowd to get restless and start spraying their bottles of paint on others. By the time the march starts, everyone is a striated version of themselves. Not that you’d really know; it’s not even 4am and it’s still dark. As the music blasts, you chip* down the road, periodically lifting a plastic cup to a nearby truck which fills it with any variety of libation you ask.

*“Chipping” is the primary means of transportation for any Carnival-goer. Since you spend so much of the week crammed amongst tens of thousands of other partiers, you can’t take a full step and, since the beat-heavy music is pervasive 24 hours a day, you sort of dance-shuffle your way along the parade route. Chipping is like a combination of a slow samba and a walk, it’s easy, and totally addictive. If it didn’t take me so long, I’d chip to work in the mornings.

As you try not to get run over by the booze truck or the thousands of people straining to get near it, you spend your time chippin’, trying to keep the inside of your cup clean, and alternately throwing paint and getting paint thrown at you. Oh, yes, there are also random pickup trucks, wheelbarrows, and barrels full of mud, chocolate sauce and paint that are being transported around by fellow flingers. As far as the eye can see (which is “not very” thanks to the combination of darkness and free rum) are people wearing horns, covered in muck. The most interesting part: they are ALL smiling. I was, too until, in my blindness, I whacked my sandaled toe against some errant concrete slab. Nonetheless, I half-chipped, half-bled my way down the street, until around 8:00am when we finally corralled our group in a park. As we hobbled up to our hotel about a mile away, they had set up showers outside for us to remove most of the filth so as not to destroy the hotel drains. After also showering for about a half hour in my hotel room, I passed out for an hour and a half. When I woke up, I donned some new shorts to get ready for our noon meeting to—you guessed it—drink and chip. As I exited the elevators, I saw people walking by still covered in paint. They were just heading home. They’d go shower off, change, then meet me and my group for another five or six hours of dancing under the cloudless sky in the 85-degree heat. Every time my colleagues and I left a party, slept, and returned to another party, we saw people wearing what they’d been wearing a day before. They still hadn’t slept. And they were still dancing better than I could.

This sort of revelry, which ultimately culminates in Mas (masquerade) where tens of thousands of people don ornate headdress and little else, where everyone coexists for days in immediate proximity to strangers, could never be so effectively achieved anywhere else in the world. I’ve seen bar fights break out because of minor bumps, spilled drinks, and stepped-on feet. Carnival is for neither the claustrophobic nor the agoraphobic. Yet if you can simply relax, enjoy the music, and move your feet a little bit, you’ll have the time of your life and find yourself thinking about how to get back there next year.

What's the wildest party you've traveled to, and was it exhilarating or just exhausting?