Chiang Mai's Songkran

Music blasts in the distance as I sit near the outdoor reception at our guesthouse drinking a large Leo beer enjoying the sensation of being dry. A watergun spits out a steady stream outside the guesthouse gate on this small alley in the center Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand. If I care to set foot outside this protected area, I need to look left and right being careful to stay on smaller streets and keep an eye out for plastic outdoor garbage containers filled with water. You can be sure that there's a young Thai somewhere around it with a bucket to soak me with. That is, of course, if I don't want to join the party.

Songkran is the Thai New Year. It is one of their most important national holidays. At one point, the year actually changed on Songkran but not anymore. Festivities begin on the 11^th or 12^th and end on the 15^th. Meanwhile, the holiday itself is the 13^th of April. It is Thai custom to pour water over statues of Buddha during the holiday. Somewhere throughout the course of history that evolved into a country-wide water-fight. Chiang Mai, with it's muddy water moat surrounding it, is a perfect place to celebrate this kind of holiday. Foreigner and Thai alike, old and young alike, swarm to this place spraying, dumping, pouring water over anybody they see.

Bumper to bumper traffic crowds the street running along the outside edge of the old city moat. Most of the vehicles are pickup trucks. In the bed, a group of Thais soaked to the bone dump their buckets and water guns into a large garbage can to fill up and unload on passersby. They themselves, are targets of thin streams of water coming at them from all directions. At different points along the way, fire hoses pumping water from the moat direct their powerful spray at those cans in the trucks, filling them up for more water madness. Everybody is open to get sprayed or water dumped on them. Furthermore, you yourself should load up and get ready to join the action. Whether or not you are loaded with a water-gun, you will get wet, but if you are holding the power to soak, you become a target for many.

We reluctantly forked over 200 baht on a gun that broke about an hour into the fun. We were, however, prepared with a couple cups that we were using earlier to down rum n'cokes. Mihai adapted them by dunking them in the brown water to slowly pour over the head of a random squirt gun carrying participate, loud laughs accompanying the act. It wasn't until later when I realized that I had access to the large store of arms at the gate of the guesthouse that we were staying at. It was there that I picked up a gun that was going for 600 baht out on the street. I'm talking a large, powerful monster. One with a strap that you put around your shoulder to help you carry it. With that, we went back out to put it to work, mostly on the white foreigners who tended to soak without discretion. Just today we saw a bearded fellow standing well over 6 feet tall slam a buck of water into the face of a small squirt-gun wielding 7 year old Thai boy. I guess any fun can get out of hand.

All along the road next to the moat, DJs with glass surrounding them pump out beats that women on a nearby stage dance to. Them, and there male peers, spray water out of hoses over the crowd below. The largest concentration of stages is at the western gate where we decided to park ourselves for a couple hours of dancing and extending the fun. Not just dance music, but also punk rock blasted from the speakers. A group of young folks near us offered some Thai whiskey that, at the time, tasted delicious. All the while, raining with clear blue skies.

There is more to Chiang Mai than Songkran and I hope to explore more of it on another day. But I can say that Songkran in Chiang Mai is an absolute blast.