This strange 20-foot tall Alice in Wonderland type rabbit is a great introduction to the quirkiness of Burning Man. Photo by Tom Lovering
Burning Man is wonderfully quirky. Want proof? Walk 50 yards down any road.
I love it. Where else can you get a cold brew from a beer tap drilled in to the side of a coffin or discover an army of Barbie Dolls in their birthday suits.
Walking down one of Black Rock City's many roads, I came upon an army of Barbie Dolls in their birthday suits. Who knows what they were up to...
People wear quirky clothes, drive quirky vehicles and create quirky art. Check out the expressions on the fish below and on the Pitch Fork Man. Or what about the Cat Car? Or how about, uh, twin cats???
Murals are common at Burning Man. I love the expression on the striped fish and how the octopus is hitching a ride on the whale.
Pitch Fork Man is the very definition of quirky.
The Cat Car has always been one of my favorite mutant vehicles.
Here kitty kitty.
Naturally, Bone fits right into the environment. Grown men riding around on stick horsies also qualify. We are, after all the Horse-Bone Tribe.
Burning Man is a Bone kind of event. He is definitely quirky. Here, he plays unicorn on a horse's nose.
Grown men playing cowboys on toy horses also qualify as strange.
Here are a few more of my favorite examples of Burning Man quirkiness.
A tree made completely of bones.
The Suave Sphinx.
Desert mirage... a bar with its own outhouse being pulled by a tractor through the remote playa . We climbed on board and took advantage. Photo by Tom Lovering.
Man crashing bike into empty boxes. The boxes were set up specifically for that purpose.
Couch Car.
See through goat with shadow. Note garbage in stomach.
One Tribe focuses on capturing images of Burning Man and then putting them together in photo collages. I thought this collage did an excellent job of capturing the quirkiness of Burning Man.
And of course there is nothing quirky about me. I am the one on the left.
Wandering through Time and Place 
This makes me even more excited about my first, and it seems like last, burn.
I guarantee it will be a very memorable experience. Enjoy. And thanks for commenting.
Well. I never had heard of Burning Man, but I only landed here because I started a google search for a photo of Gbarnga…
I was at Phebe from ’73-’77, helping to run mobile maternal child health clinics amongst other duties. The Gbarnga market and Lebanese stores were regular stops. I enjoyed all of your Liberian posts – have skimmed them all at this point and am nearly overcome by nostalgia and memory. I went back in ’85 for six weeks, post-coup but pre-civil war. I miss the country, which is to say I miss the people I knew there. Some did survive the war. Others have disappeared.
I need to do some writing about those days myself, especially about the trips to the villages so far into the bush the kids never had seen a white woman. And Zorzor, and the Guinea border. And the trip to Freetown, when I spent nearly a day sitting on the Liberia/Sierra Leone border, refusing to give the guard his dash. 😉
Oh, my. Wonderful writing, wonderful memories – some of the best I’ve come across from an expat-perspective.
Thanks for your comments. The war was tragic and so unnecessary. The people of Liberia continue to suffer because of it. Like you, the experience of working in Liberia was one of the highlights in my life.