Songkran

Well, I survived the Songkran festival without any major injury. Thai people really know how to party, that festival is freaking crazy!! You get soaked wherever you go, but people tend to congregate around the moat where there’s an ample supply of water. There you get regularly demolished by buckets of thrown water and water pistols of all kinds, some of it with ice in it which is a shock to the system in this kind of weather. Heaps of the businesses on the moat road convert to discos for a few days and supply barrels of water for passerbys to reload. The roads themselves are jammed up with scooters, utes, tuk-tuks, and sorngtow all filled with people and more barrels of water doing drive byes on each other and generally getting soaked as well. There’s so much water being thrown around that it’s ankle deep in the streets in some places. Then they have stages set up with music and festivities, and foam machines which bury entire intersections under froth. And of course the ever present food, massage, and assorted knickknack stalls set up everywhere. I ate so may Thai rotis, my favourite being banana and egg with sweetened condensed milk, that shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s. On the first day they take all of the Buddhas out of the temples in Chiang Mai (there’s a LOT) and they carry them around the city on floats with traditional dancing girls, flag holders, music, etc. Then you’re supposed to throw this holy water on them which has safflower and other spices in it. I believe that’s where the water fight itself is supposed to have started, by tipping this same water on the neck or shoulders of another person you’re blessing them. You would often see people do this to children and older people. Then there’s the more rowdy areas where everybody is drinking (Thai people love to feed you a mix of Thai Whisky and Chang beer, which actually doesn’t taste nearly as bad as it sounds, but it gets you really drunk really quick). Even so Thai people tend to be nice about throwing a bucket of ice water all over you, where as the Australians, Americans, and English tend to throw it as hard as they can in your face while whooping hysterically. Well, that’s an incredibly broad generalisation about a lot of people, most of whom aren’t actually like that, but you know what I mean.

So on top of Songkran I’ve been tearing up dance floors across Chiang Mai. There’s been a few beach festivals in a local forest which were really cool, I didn’t get home until the sun was coming up from the second one. Then the other night I had a coffee at around 9pm because I’d really wanted a dance for days but had been too tired. So then a friend and I hijacked a bar and started a crazy dance floor in it and ended up with a bunch of other crazy dancers joining us, and someone thankfully dragged me home at around 4am because I really needed to sleep but hadn’t realised it yet. And then again last night, but no coffee so I came home a bit earlier. And it’s a bit funny because I keep seeing the same people around, like this Thai woman who runs a guest house and restaurant just down the road which I love to eat at. I run into her at every big party I go to, and often just out randomly as well, she’s great fun. And I’ve had a few situations now where people will come up and chat to me for a while, and I’ll eventually work out that I must have been dancing with them at some stage and just forgotten their face. But anyway, it’s time to stop for a bit I think, I’m not drinking much but it invariably blows out your budget anyway, and the late nights are starting to add up. Plus I’ve accrued a bunch of dancing related injuries, like blisters on both my big toes and a new big one on my heel, and 2 REALLY old black toes from Protoculture back in Oz. It’s amazing how good you feel after a big night on a dance floor though, if I stay out late and sit all night then I really feel it the next day, but if I dance the night away I generally feel pretty good.

The political situation exploded right before Songkran with that clash between the red shirts and the army. The death toll was up to 23 I think yesterday. I’m not sure how much you guys hear about it all, I guess you get some of it on the news. I’m not 100% sure what happened myself but I gather there were grenades being thrown at the army and the army shot back. And I think they’ve been trying to capture the red shirt leaders as well, they may have got one, and I know another one escaped out a window of the hotel he was in. It’s all a bit crazy and will probably kick off again now that Songkran has ended. That said I met a fair number of tourists who travelled up through Bangkok to get to Chiang Mai for the festival, and they all said everyone was very nice and civilised, although one girl did get tear gassed by an army helicopter. We had truck loads of red shirts in Chiang Mai too but they were all just joining in on the festivities and waving flags at the same time. Nobody is targeting tourists at all, I think it’s perfectly safe so long as you don’t get caught in the middle of a protest or accidentally walk past a phone booth with a bomb in it. There are SO many other ways to die in Thailand (or anywhere else for that matter); I really don’t feel like this situation is very high on the list.