Travel special: Oktoberfest

Not doing enough drinking in the UK? Maybe a trip to Oktoberfest will quench your thirst. Sam Bishop has this advice for surviving the annual Bavarian beer festival in Munich.

So, you've packed a healthy thirst, your drinking boots, aspirin and a party attitude. You're ready for Oktoberfest, right? Almost. But with more than six million visitors drinking six million litres of beer, eating almost half a million chickens and a couple of hundred thousand sausages, this 18-day beer binge is bigger than your average weekend booze up or house party. You wouldn't go on a mission across Europe without your trusty Lonely Planet, would you? So then, set your brain to sponge and soak up our survival guide like a pretzel absorbs beer.

History
A party the scale of Oktoberfest doesn't just pop up overnight. In fact, it's taken 173 years for the legend of 'Die Wiesn' to grow. Beerfest actually started as a celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig to Princess Therese. To celebrate the couple's vows, the fun-loving Bavarians threw a giant fair which continues today, albeit in a much larger form. Oktoberfest is still held on a patch named Theresienwiese (Therese's meadow) in honour of the princess. Since organisers started keeping detailed records in 1950, beer consumption has risen almost 600% as the popularity of the festival spread outwards from Munich around the world.

Getting there
Theresienwiese is a sweeping expanse of parkland on the outskirts of the city centre. A 10 to 15 minute walk from Munich's Hauptbahnhof (main station) it's impossible to miss the beer grounds with the sheer mass of bodies moving in a trance-like state towards their first stein of the day. There is no charge to enter the beer grounds, although there is an unwritten law which requires all foreign visitors to identify themselves by purchasing a gawdy novelty hat in the shape of a stein, T-shirt or heart-shaped gingerbread cookie when leaving the grounds at the end of a heavy session.

Geography
To get from your hotel to the beer grounds you walk left out the front door, hang a leftie, a right at the first set of lights and walk straight until the end of the road before turning right. Voilà, there you are. Easy, right? OK, then, how about getting home, then? This is where things become tricky, especially if, like me, you're the one who always insists you know the right way to go - even if you've no idea at all and especially once you've had a skinful.

Taking the two-hour scenic route home might sound like fun and, if like me you're lucky enough to find the world's best late night pizza joint (at the Hauptbahnhof end of Senefelderstrasse) they can be. However trekking across Munich at midnight on a chilly autumn night isn't necessarily an ideal end to festivities. Carry a map, your hotel will have one.

Culture and traditions
While Oktoberfest is all about good, clean (for the most part), alcohol-induced fun, there are some survival guide tips you can follow to allow you to get the most out of the experience.

Arriving at 9am well before the beer starts flowing might make you feel like an addict waiting for his/her first hit of the day, but seeing as you can't get a drink unless you've nabbed a seat, you'll be smiling on the other side of your oh-so-thirsty face if you decide to arrive fashionably late. The no seat, no beer rule seems to have been relaxed in the Höfbrauhaus tent - especially in the centre of the enormous marquee, lovingly known as the 'Pigpen' to its predominantly Antipodean crowd.

Once you've got a seat and a stein - that's a litre, or Ein Mass to the locals -you might be wondering what happens next. Well, the widely accepted convention seems to be to get drunk, dance around like a pork chop while listening to the Oompah bands and sing Ein Prost with alarming regularity.

After a couple of steins you might find yourself a little peckish. Forget a filthy serving of fried chicken or Maccas, the good folk at Oktoberfest are happy to help you stuff your face Bavarian style. Whole and half chickens and sausages are favourites, pretzels are tops at soaking up the beer from your belly while replacing some salt.

Economy
Some people say that Oktoberfest is a pricey little adventure. They're right. Beerfest is definitely not the event you want to go to in a penny-pinching mood, so throw caution to the wind, raid that ATM and drink away happily (if you drink enough, you mightn't even remember that 15th withdrawal from the on-site cashpoint).

This year, a beer will set you back about €8, which is not too bad. A feed will set you back anywhere from €2.50 for a pretzel to €12 and upwards for virtually a whole leg of pork.

Save a bit of coinage for some rides, best experienced on the sober side of tipsy rather the 'I'm-so-drunk-I-can't-scratch-myself' side of paralytic and, of course, don't forget that stein-shaped novelty hat, T-shirt and cheap, nasty cigar.

Dangers
These are few and far between in a city which could vie for the title of 'Friendliest And Happiest Place on Earth', but there are some things to look out for. The big two are ever-present when alcohol filters into the bloodstream, prompting a spot of trestle table dancing. We don't need to revise Newton's first law, but suffice to say that when bopping along to Take Me Home, Country Roads while dancing on the top of a table somewhere between your sixth and seventh steins, it's worth remembering two things.

1. The 'see-saw effect'. Remember what used to happen to your poor mate when you leapt off the see-saw at the bottom? If you see someone climb off at the end of the table, or if you feel the balance shift, prepare to say hello to the same floorboards that made quite an impression - literally - on my forehead last year.

2. Beer is not non-stick. Sure, swinging your stein around while belting out Ein Prost is a laugh. Sure, your trainers are pretty grippy, and sure, you're as sure-footed as a mountain goat. Don't say you weren't warned.

Finally, it might seem like a good idea to nick off with a stein at the end of the night, but besides being heavy, there are laws that protect the valuable little vessels being kidnapped by light-fingered revellers. Security firms are hired specifically to deal with stein theft and if you get caught expect to be, at worst, turned over to the police and prosecuted, or at best, banned from the grounds for the rest of the festival.

Beerfest by numbers
Area: 103.79 acres (0.42km)
Seats in halls: 100,000
Electricity used: 2.8kWh (enough to keep a family of four powered up for more than 52 years)
Employees: 12,000
On-site expenditure: €450 million
Toilets: 980 and 878m of urinals