New Orleans or Rio? Inside the world's wildest festivals

Both festivals - Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro Carnival - fire up bucket lists like few other events around the world, but which one will you partake in first? Our experts help you decide.

By Amy Cooper

If you listen carefully right now, you can hear the throb of the planet's two almightiest annual parties.

The carnivals in Rio and New Orleans peak this week on Tuesday, the last hurrah before Lent, when Christians traditionally embark on 40 days of abstinence and penitence. That's one heck of a hangover, but you can bet the celebration's worth it. Especially if you opt for the NOLA version.

My-oh-me-oh - why not Rio? While it's hard to ignore the place that gave us the butt lift, the bikini wax and the sorts of costumes that necessitate both, say hola to NOLA because New Orleans has the superior revelry resume.

In the Crescent City on the Mississippi, even funerals are street parties. It's the birthplace of jazz and America's first cocktail (the sensational Sazerac) and any time in the year you might walk the streets and be swept into a parade of hundreds dancing along to a brass band. You can drink alcohol outside from a "go cup", and savour a potent cultural potion of Caribbean, Creole, Cajun, Afro-American and Native American influences that all translate into that one Big Easy motto: "Let the good times roll."

Mardi Gras shakes up this cocktail and showers it all over the city from early January right through to Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday", or maybe "Tuesday of size", in today's parlance).

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In the two weeks leading to the big day, 70 citywide parades dazzle with more than 1000 floats, plus dancers, motorcycle squadrons and marching bands. Crowds will swell this year to more than a million. The spectacle is superlative, but Mardi Gras' real magic is in its deeper layers of lore.

Every parade has its signature "throws" - trinkets lobbed into the crowds from floats by the "krewes" who stage the parades. You might catch anything from beads to a bedazzled toilet plunger. In Treme, America's oldest Afro-American neighbourhood, the North Side Skull & Bone Gang conduct dawn house calls in their skeleton garb, and the Mardi Gras Indians blend feathered, beaded and bejewelled costumes that take a year to construct, only to be worn once.

You might encounter the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus or the Knights of Nemesis, or marvel at the largest Mardi Gras float, a 100-metre, nine-section behemoth dedicated to a New Orleans historical amusement park.

Mardi Gras even has its own official food: king cake, a rich brioche dough filled with chocolate or cream cheese and glazed with Mardi Gras colours of purple, green and gold.

Add delicious Louisiana classics like jambalaya, gumbo, Po-Boys and beignets, wash it all down with a Hurricane or a Vieux Carre on a Bourbon Street balcony, and you won't be able to copa with any other carnival.

By Mal Chenu

You haven't partied till you've danced the samba in Jesus' armpit. Suvaco do Cristo, literally translated as Christ's armpits, is situated directly under the outstretched arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue that gazes beneficently over Rio De Janeiro.

This sweaty salvation site is home to one of the biggest blocos (Rio Carnival street parties) that dot the legendary Brazilian city throughout Carnival week. More than 500 blocos are government-sanctioned and properly organised, but thousands more pop up wherever people want to party. The Rio Carnival is the world's biggest bash. It makes Mardi Gras look like a school recital.

These days two million people take to the swirling, shimmering Rio streets to celebrate samba, splendour and sequins. Every. Single. Day. In the blink of a Bundchen, the whole population becomes gorgeous and the whole city becomes a dancefloor.

The Samba Parade is another Rio Carnival highlight. More than 80,000 spectators watch floats and 5000 flamboyantly dressed pretty young Cariocas bop along a wide avenue at the Sambodromo (Samba-drome) stadium as hundreds of drums, cymbals, bass instruments and trumpets echo through the streets, and into your heart.

Glittery, feathered, outrageously neon costumes that reveal more than a legal deposition warp the mind. "How can normal people look this beautiful?" "How do humans bend like that?" "How is it possible that a 170cm woman can have 160cm legs?"

My co-columnist can spruik Mardi Gras' king cake, costumes and masks 'till the trombones sound good. But deep down she wants to be the girl from Ipanema. She can smirk about the Rio Carnival as much as she likes but when my Amy smiles at me, I go to Rio. 'Coz I'm a salsa fellow, oh-my-oh-me-oh.