Songkran!

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Jesse and I were lucky enough to be traveling Thailand during Songkran, the Thai New Year Festival. It goes on for about 5 or 6 days. A local suggested to me that its ending date has a lot to do with when people run out of money and are too hungover to continue the party. We spent the festival in Chiang Mai and Chiang Khong, in Northern Thailand.

Chiang Mai is Thailand's cultural and intellectual center, though Bangkok is certainly the population and commerce giant. The 'old city' is about 6x6 blocks and is surrounded by walls and a moat, which are hundreds of years old. This moat plays a big part in celebrating Songkran. Originally, Songkran had been celebrated by anointing Buddha images with water scented with oils and flowers. Over the years, people began anointing each other, and in the modern day, it is a full on water fight. The water fight includes traffic. Most traffic in Thailand is open air, either motorbikes or some form of tuk tuk (like a rickshaw with a motorbike up front). It is not unusual to see someone driving down the street on a motorcycle, spraying people with a watergun held in his left hand. People post up on the street in groups, either with huge rain barrels or by the moat, and fill buckets and pour them on passing pedestrians and drivers. There are also big trucks driving around, with their beds packed with a huge oil drum filled with water, and drunk thais dipping buckets in it and pouring water all over you. It was a FANTASTIC TIME but VERY hard to travel in. To leave the city without soaking our backpacks we had to get up at about 6am, and we still had to run and dodge some overexcited kids with water guns.

The best part was manning the bucket station outside our guesthouse with the owning family's five children. They were scattered in age from 3-12, and we shared almost 0 language, but still had an amazing time playing with them. It's funny how universal a smile and a laugh are.

In a stroke of great practicality, I decided to teach Jesse how to drive a motorbike during this festival. We got out of town, where most of the action happens, but the soaking continued. It was one of those "what the..." moments. You're driving on a highway, and then you see a few 4 and 5 year olds standing right at the edge of the highway, unattended, with buckets ready to splash at you as you drive by at 80 kph. Craziness. I was very glad my helmet has a full face shield. The soaking is actually refreshing, as Thailand in April can be brutally hot. It's been over 40c/100f on a few days.

APOLOGY! All of the pictures of this were taken on waterproof disposable cameras, so they wont be developed til I get back to the states. HOWEVER!, i DO have pictures from the Chiang Khong festival, which was RIDICULOUS.

Chiang Khong is the border town on the way to Huay Xai, Laos. Most people just spend a night there and then get the morning ferry, but i hate hectic travel, so we stayed an extra day, and rented bikes to putt around.

It was still Songkran, so the water was flowing freely. We rented bikes and got out of town (the motorcycle breeze was the only thing keeping me alive, it was the hottest/humidest weather I think I've ever experienced) and we drove north. The landscape was absolutely breathtaking, it was like another planet, and every few kilometers we would pass a little stand of bamboo and thatch huts. We were sold our gasoline out of old liquor bottles sold from a bamboo hut. It was surreal. And we stopped at this random organic tea plantation that sold us the BEST thai ice teas i've ever had in my life. It was amazing.

Unfortunately, Jesse learned a lesson about gyroscopic force the hard way, and had a spill on the bike. For the speed we were moving at, he lucked out and only got a few patches of road rash, but still needed a bit of a patch up, so we pushed on another 20km to the next town to find some help. (we also stopped at a buddhist temple on the way for help, but only received a blessing--maybe it worked, in retrospect) Unfortunately, the clinic in town was closed for the festival, so we had to settle for what first aid supplies we could find at the general store. Unfortunately, this consisted only of alcohol pads, soap, and surgical masks (people wear surgical masks all over the place in Asia, I don't know why really). So we go to the festivals bathroom, clean jesse up, and elastic band the surgical masks over his wounds. It's a few days later and he's healing fine. while we were patching him up, we held the line up a bit. These two 4 year old girls come up, look into the bathroom, see it's occupied, give us an annoyed look, and just drop and start peeing on the dirt directly in front of us, while giving us the evil eye the whole time. What a mess.

That night, back in town we hear SUPER loud thai pop (which is RIDICULOUS music) and someone speaking over a megaphone. We follow the noise, and we end up at the end of songkran "Miss Chiang Khong Songkran festival contest thingy." It was the most ridiculous thing ever. I was under the impression that, except for a dirty sex industry in bangkok and pattaya started by US soldiers visiting thailand as an R&R stop during the vietnam war, Thai culture was for the most part very conservative. I MUST have been wrong. The festival included tons of food and drink vendors clustered around a stage with a live band, an MC/singer, and 10 early 20s girls in lingerie dancing around the MC. There were hundreds of generally wasted Thais packed around the stage dancing. Behind the dancing group, there were families with five year olds and babies hanging out on blankets and folding chairs picnic-style, like they were at a Peter Paul and Mary concert, while their daughters and nieces dance on stage like prostitutes. Local people (male and female) would go onstage and stuff money into the dancers lingerie, and whoever generated the most money (for charity, I hope) was crowned Miss Songkran. We were the only foreigners there. It was absolutely nuts. The Thai people don't really 'cheers' and tap drinks the way we do, but they know the 'falang' (westerners) do, and they had a blast cheersing us. I've never felt so popular. Someone gave me a necklace/lei type thing to put on a girl onstage to 'vote' with, but I felt sort of dirty participating, so I put it on the 40 year old man MC instead. In retrospect, I think I made myself look gay in front of most of Northeast Thailand. But my dignity is intact!

Other than being a little depressing, for the girls sake, it was a really fun time partying with the locals. They were overwhelmingly welcoming and friendly (but maybe that was just the rice whiskey talking).

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