Songkran: A Wet, Hot Thai New Year
by Rachel
How do you describe a 72 hour water fight? How do you explain the knowing feeling you get when you walk outside and expect that every person you pass will splash you, shoot you, or dump a bucket of water on your head?
It's easily 100+ degrees outside, but some of the water is gross. It's green and smelly, and it's been sitting, stagnant, in the canal for far too long. Some of the water is freezing, it's poured from garden hoses into giant plastic drums, cooled by enormous and heavy cubes of fresh bought ice. Women walk around with silver bowls, gently pouring perfumed water down your neck and wishing you a happy, cleansed, and blessed new year. You thank them for it. Teenage boys whip buckets of moat water at breakneck speeds and with such force that is feels like a slap. They make it impossible to pass by certain street corners. Then there's the backpacker crowd, carrying supersoakers and aiming for people's faces. Those kids can go to hell.
One evening, we walked out of our hostel, thankful for a few minutes of dryness. Granny next door was tending to her flowers, giggled in our direction and sprayed up with her hose. All you can do is shrug, laugh, and splash back.
This goes on for 3 days. Understandably, there are few photos.
In Chiang Mai - a city know for its extensive celebration - it starts the night before, when you're shopping for weapons that soak. We bought water guns, which are novel but far less effective or satisfying than the buckets the locals use and we picked up the following day.
The first afternoon, the owner of our hostel piled us all into the back of her pickup truck with a giant reserve of ice water, of course. We filed out onto the main road that follows the canal around the old city and joined the thousand or so other trucks crawling down the lane. Tens of thousands of would-be splashers line the moat and soak the riders and pedestrians. The traffic doesn't move; we become sitting ducks. Other trucks, overflowing with entire families and groups of friends, send waves of ice water crashing over our heads: a welcome, if stinging, respite from the steaming green moat water. We drive around the block - it takes an hour - refill and swap riders at the hostel.
On the second loop, there's even more people on the road. The truck sits and sits and sits and never reaches the corner of the block, so we hop out and make our way towards a street filled with Western restaurants and tourists. The block has two opposing factions on either side, soaking each other and anyone mistaken enough to come down the roadway. A pizza delivery motorbike leaves the restaurant in head-to-toe yellow rubber rain gear. We sat down, ordered beers and a strange, Thai interpretation of potato skins, and watched the chaos - water dripping from our clothes and pooling beneath us on the restaurant floor.
The festivities settle down a bit at night, but the threat of a splashing still looms around every corner. In the city square, there are performances of sorts with Thai women dancing, men drumming, and even painters painting for a crowd of sitting onlookers. One women tells a long, tragic story in Thai followed by the same story in English. After a day of high energy water games, its enough to put both of us to sleep.
The festival is not all about getting wet, there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind the use of water. Buddhists believe that water cleanses, washing people of not just the physical, but the spiritual as well. Songkran is celebrated during Buddhist New Year. In ancient Siam, the monks would wash the temples for the new year and the people would collect the holified water and sprinkle it on one another to usher in a year of blessing. In that spirit, often when you splash a Thai person during the festival they will thank you as you have helped with their clenching. This deeper spiritual meaning may be lost among some of the Westerners squirting people in the eye, but we can't all be highly beings enlightened, can we?
When it's all over, the city empties out. Thousands of backpackers pile into buses and leave on the last night of the festival. The next day is eerily quiet. The crowds have gone and it's the start of low season. Residents who can afford to like to go back to their hometowns and celebrate with their families. Some stay out of town until the end of the month. Other return to Chiang Mai after the weekend, reopening shuttered restaurants and shops. We stuck around and explored Chiang Mai in earnest the next few days.