I went to Burning Man and it was even crazier than I expected

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Burning Man Costumes

Business Insider/Aly Weisman

Attendance at Burning Man is up to nearly 70,000 people.

Burning Man 2016 officially started on Sunday.

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Even as photos of this year's festival have started trickling onto social media, many are still baffled by what exactly goes on at the week-long event.

Three years ago, I went to Burning Man for the first time. Last year, I returned for round two.

While I had attended many different festivals previously, Burning Man was unlike anything I had ever seen.

Burning Man, as the website proclaims, is "an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self expression and self-reliance in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada."

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The festival is a choose your own adventure of early morning meditation, late nights lit up by neon and pulsating music, art installations, bicycle adventures, and much more.

The first year I attended in 2013, so did more than 61,000 other people. By the time I went back in 2015, attendance had grown to nearly 70,000 participants.

Here's what happens inside the wild world of Burning Man.