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Published: April 13th 2007
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Dry people are Brought into the fold! Thai New Year April 13/2007
A very late but totally necessary add on to what has been going on in the last couple of months would definitely be Sonkran. The celebration of the Thai New Year is a beautiful water ceremony that goes back long enough, that western culture has managed to infiltrate and totally mess with the true meaning and significance of it.
The true essence of it is water is poured over friends and loved ones to purify the person in the next year and good luck will be sure to follow. That is the story that I was told, that being said I could have been totally lied to, but there seems to be some relevance to it. The celebration varies in duration from a week to a single day where I am on Koh Tao. I can’t even imagine just how much pain I would be in after a week of that mayhem.
Now to the fun but not quite accurate interpretation of how the party gets off the ground now days. Sleep in till around 11, have a really good substantial breakfast(this will be the last solid food you find today). Now
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No matter the age this day is for everyone head to the nearest bar, which for me is the Asia Divers restaurant, buy a bottle of Thai whisky and get at it. For the foreign people, the Thai’s give a very special treat, as they are dousing you with water they pelt you with prickly heat powder, I think that’s what they call it because that’s what it gives you, one mean and fiery rash, that takes a week to go away. It doesn’t matter how you are moving down the road, walk, run, bicycle, scooter, car, old or young nobody is safe. You had just better slow up and let them do their thing and get it out of their system, this takes about 7hrs. All this being said you are allowed to fight back with vigor, usually done by spending loads of money on the most powerful squirt gun money can buy. I found that the best combo was a piss can type of high volume water cannon, preceded by the highest pressure gun you can get. Boobs and crotches are the best targets, stuns em’, then finish them with the volume. This method is only used on fellow travelers never Thai locals, there are unwritten rules
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Muppets on quads, we really hate these people(they cause most of the accidents), so they get it good. of respect that need to be followed, Just getting them wet seems to give you enough satisfaction to get through the day. All this attack and counter attack seems like senseless fun right up until you walk up to a shop to fill up your weapons and a lovely older Thai lady stops you and slowly pours a warm bowl of water over your head blessing you the whole time, she never gets anything but the most sincere bow that you can muster.
As for the way we went about our day, well we do have an unusually high concentration of x-Military people that dive with our company, and these guys will do just about anything to get together and go attack a weaker force. Just feed them a few good belts then turn em’ loose. We attacked like any great Roman army, storm over and take prisoners, then make them fight for us in the next campaign. We attacked a total of 6 dive shops with a starting force of 20 and ended with close to 60. Not too bad for our first effort. After the general silliness of the first 4hrs has passed we all head to
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Troops getting ready a beach bar called Simple Life, there really is nowhere else to party, another of the unwritten rules. Doesn’t really matter it would have been fun in any spot near the ocean. The beach is a perfect wind up to this little shin dig, after all it is a pretty damn big bucket of water. So the party has been going for about 7hrs and most people can barely walk. Time to go home, that would have been a solid thought, but then that just doesn’t fit me, we still had another 12hrs to go, that is as near as I could put back together with the limited evidence that I could find. The only thing that I could totally remember was deciding that I was too pissed to ride my bike home so I thought pushing it would be a safe bet. No, no it was definitely not safe, I dropped the damn thing on myself about 3 times, carving some rather big chunks out of myself. My bike has now been nicknamed Christine, after Steven King’s novel.
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