Songkhran - Thai New Year

April is the hottest month in Thailand. Being somewhat north of the equator, the seasonal effect of summer begins to kick in. Both the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand get a lot of very hot sunlight, which evaporates a lot of water. The water vapor moves along a concentration gradient to the north, where it cools and begins to condense on microscopic dust particles in the air, forming raindrops. Or so the theory goes.
The long hot wait for the rain adds another layer of vexation to the already-repressed Thai society. People here are not encouraged to express anger or dissatisfaction – raising one’s voice is seen as distasteful; losing one’s temper, barbaric. Over the normal course of days and weeks of human existence, as we all know, there are plenty of occasions where people around us behave idiotically or spitefully, important things get lost or broken, plans gang aglay, and it’s actually quite relieving to pop off a bit (well for me anyway – I like a good shout now and then.) But here, people don’t do that – they just bottle up all the rage and pretend that nothing is the matter. They walk around for most of the year with a big kettle of simmering vinegar in their heart, pretending that their feelings aren’t hurt or their vituperation excited. Add in the unrelieved, life-sapping April heat, that continues to bake up out of the concrete all night long, and the whole society is filled with emotional autoclaves that are barely within tolerance limits.
The solution is Songkhran, the week-long celebration of Thai New Year. I haven’t done my homework properly, but from hearsay, it stems from the ritual anointing of Buddha images with water, which later expanded to the gentle ablution of the elderly with scented water, and then somehow snowballed into the all-out tribal water frenzy I am going to describe below. My intuition tells me that the Thais, a water-loving people, had some kind of similar ritual built into their culture long before any Buddha images arrive. Thais used to worship human-headed watersnakes called Nagas, that lived in rivers, and in the same way the pagan solstice fires were turned into St John’s Day in Finland, I believe that those watersnakes are behind the primitive fury with which the Thai people embrace this holiday.
I was invited to stay at my friend Jen’s house in Lampang, about 90 minutes southeast of Chiang Mai. Jen teaches at the local university and is fairly well embedded in Lampang. There were many foreigners in the region who were going to band together for the duration of the festival.
The first day, we prepared to venture forth. Jen warned that anything we brought with us would be thoroughly soaked, so all electronics, notepads, dictionaries, or credit cards should either be thoroughly wrapped in Ziploc bags or left at home. Jen girded herself with a water-gun that had a backpack tank shaped like a monkey face. I was loathe to invest any money in a water-hurling device, so I did the next best thing: a two-liter bottle with a hole poked in the cap. With proper pressure, this could squirt a surprising distance. We were joined by Rob and Becca, a couple from Washington DC, and we went out to the main street.
It was an exuberant watery chaos. People had set up bamboo-and-cloth stands on the sidewalk to keep the sun off their heads, and underneath these stands were 50-gallon drums of water, or kiddie pools, replenished by hoses that snaked out of places of business. There was massive automobile and foot traffic, and the sidewalk people used buckets, pans, water guns, cups, and hoses to throw water at the people going by.


This was especially dangerous when the target was a motorcycle laden with two or three people, and the driver received a gallon right in the face.


Much of the traffic consisted of dangerously-overloaded pickup trucks with 50-gallon barrels or trash cans filled with water, and the passengers hurled it back at the people in the street.


To my eye the jets of water coming out of buckets looked somewhat like the shapes of the Naga spirits, as if each soaking iteration were an invocation of those ancient gods.


Some of the vehicles had giant palm fronds to shade the passengers.


Often a small child rode in the bucket itself.


The water, on the whole, was vile – the kind of stuff you find in the bottom of a vase after the flowers have lost their petals. It was probably pumped straight up from the river. Thai people regard their rivers as vast, constantly-flushing toilets which are equally happy to receive turds, industrial waste, dead dogs, or the crinkly ashes from a pile of burnt plastic garbage.
As we walked down the street, we all tried to keep the water out of our mouths, but as tall pale people, we were immediately targeted for special attention from every participant. We were instantly soaked to the bone. The other common ritual is to smear a kind of chalk putty on people’s faces. Thais do not usually touch each other, so this is a big breach of custom – the single time in the year when it is permissible to touch a stranger or your significant other on the cheek in public. It was very gentle, and was accompanied by a soft muttering by the daubers, and it had a kind of religious anointment tone about it.


The chalk was usually washed off fairly quickly by the buckets of water that rained down or jetted up. The worst people, we soon discovered, were the 9-13 year old boys. There’s something about boys in this bracket that makes them unnecessarily serious about aggression. I remember being that way myself – playing too rough at things like pillowfights or dodgeball, not appreciating that it was all in fun, not acknowledging that real damage was not the object. So too were these Thai boys, with their super-amped-up pump-action super soakers. They would point them directly at our eyes or mouths, and with very serious expressions on their faces, mercilessly squirt. My homemade watergun was capable of delivering a stout stream, and I often returned fire straight into their faces, but this was a call for all-out warfare, as it got the boys’ amygdalae involved, and they became slaves to their hot anger. One boy followed me for half a block, pelting me in the face with stinking water until his gun was empty. If memory serves me correctly, that kind of water gun was banned in the US around 1994 because some 9-13 year old boy had filled his with bleach and sprayed it into a rival’s eyes.


Chalky and dripping, we made our way to a restaurant called The Riverside, where we joined some other friends, including Jen’s boyfriend Otto, a soft-spoken and very intelligent Thai man. We had cold drinks and watched a parade roll past. This was a typical Thai parade, with banner-bearers, people in traditional costumes waving down from floats, ranks of people walking in identical outfits, live music, and speakers blaring from under waterproof covers. What distinguished this parade were the palanquins bearing animal images or Buddha images – the very images that were being bathed in the celebration. Sometimes an old monk rode next to an image, and was constantly wiping the water out of his eyes.







The parade trailed off, and people filled the streets, dancing, throwing water, and smearing chalk. By this time the Thai people were drinking heavily, even the teenagers, and there was a kind of insane, raucous hilarity erupting from all directions. We waded through this and took refuge at another friend’s house – suddenly I had new friends all over town! – and sat on his porch, slinging water at passersby and eating noodles in the shade. When the sun started to go down, we actually started feeling cold – a novelty, but a somewhat wretched one. The group broke up and promised to reunite the next morning. The local revelry continued well into the night, punctuated by the distinctive artillerine crump of dry-ice bombs.
We went out again in the morning, this time armed with little dishes of the facial chalk. My squirtgun had broken and I didn’t want to drink another 2 liters of soda to make a new one. We had, however, introduced dye into our face-chalk so that each of us had a lurid color to smear on Thai faces. Mine was purple, and I started putting purple handprints on signs, windows, and cars.
A day and night of drinking had not improved the people’s dispositions, and while they were still obviously in a celebratory mode, there was a new viciousness in the water attacks that had been absent the day before. This was startlingly apparent in the temperature of the water: many, many people now had giant chunks of ice bobbing in their reservoirs, and they took sadistic pleasure squirting it into ears or pouring it down the backs of necks. Even on such a hot day it is not a pleasant experience. I am reminded of the hospital assay of brain activity by squirting cold water into the patient’s ear. The people who had to make do with lukewarm water compensated by hurling it in large quantities directly in the faces of motorcyclists or unwary pedestrians. The chalk-smearers exercised their contempt by swabbing great clotted gobs of the paste directly onto the eyebrows, so that the next dose of water made it run down into the eyes. Since this is my only Songkhran experience, other than being hit by a water balloon eight years ago, I don’t know if the second day is more aggressive by tradition or if it was only the mood of that particular time. It was certainly focused more intensively on the foreigners, for I imagine there is some frustration harbored toward people from wealthy faraway lands who come into Thailand and have immediate access to all the best services.
Near the center of town was a large fountain with several accessory pools. Hundreds of people swarmed through the fountain, playing in the jets of water.


Another parade was crossing through the fountain-square, and we stopped to observe it. This time it was predominantly Buddha images, riding on elevated daïses in pickup trucks, adorned with real and artificial flowers. These were followed by public dignitaries in horse-drawn carriages, including the diminutive mayor of Lampang. The old Roman trick of obliging your beasts of burden to fast before a parade had not reached this part of Thailand yet, and each carriage had a little shallow cauldron placed below its horse’s exhaust port. These necessarily caught some of the overflow of the water that was pitched at the passengers, and I must admit that a big bowl of unwholesome soup sloshing around directly in front of the public officials’ feet tended to understate their dignity.
Standing apart from the action were a pair of gorgeous Thai girls all made up in beautiful gowns, fancy hair and very high heels, carrying parasols. They had a little satellite man orbiting them, keeping water-throwers and chalk-smearers at a distance. He carried a tall trophy on a transparent crystalline base, presumably won by one or both of the girls, and this he used as a knout to discourage passersby from getting too close. The girls stood like living trophies themselves, smiling blandly, images of themselves, tall, splendid, unapproachable.
At last we returned to Jen’s house for a potluck. I brought an obscene quantity of ripe mangoes and a wad of sticky rice the size of a chihuahua. Hilary had somehow acquired a clay pot from Eastern Thailand that contained a fiery distillate of rotten rice. Otto, being from Eastern Thailand himself, was much excited to see it, and went through a strange ritual of preparation that involved scraping a thick layer of ash off the top, adding water to a layer of chipped wood and herbs, and insertion of two long wooden straws.


It had a rich foresty flavor with several interesting undertones. It reminded me favorably of some of the herbal liqueur I sampled in Austria last year, but unlike the Austrian stuff, the Thai liqueur did not imbue my urine with a fresh flowery bouquet.
The next day we undertook a somewhat more solemn part of the Thai New Year celebration. We went to the oldest temple in the region, Wat Phrathat Lampang Luang, dating back to the fifteenth century. At the base of the stairway were a pair of singha, mythical beasts that are the Thai equivalent of Cerberus or the Garm. One of them had little ancillary heads growing out of the side of his neck.


Inside the old temple, we each got a small fistful of flowers, three incense sticks, and a little yellow candle. We removed our shoes and knelt in supplication to the vast Buddha image, kowtowing three times. We placed our flowers in vases at the Buddha’s feet. Then we re-shod our own feet and went out to a magnificent chedi, a bell-shaped structure that houses the remains of ancient holy folk. Around the base of the chedi was a full-on fire ceremony: iron racks with little cups to hold the yellow candles, and fonts of sand to insert the burning incense.


So many people had put their candles in the racks that the wax had all liquefied and formed a great seething puddle on the stone ground. The puddle had itself ignited, the wax-fire brilliant even in broad daylight, and the devout had to reach through sheets of flame and greasy smoke to add their candles to the rack. After our candles were safely in place, we walked around the chedi three times, thinking about what we wanted from the new year. Unlike any other I have seen, this chedi was jacketed in some copper-based amalgam, and sparkled with a deep, blue-green patina.


A Buddha image from some antique age still graced the courtyard.


After circling three times, we placed our incense sticks in the sand-filled tureens. There were hundreds or thousands of sticks burning in them already. I foolishly leaned too far over, trying to access some real-estate near the back lip of the tureen, and my Tonasket University Department of Marine Paleobiology shirt suffered an incense-sized burn hole. This is my newest shirt, and I am not happy about this latest addition. I hope it is not prophetic in regards to my next year of life.
We ended Songkhran with ice cream and a screening of Star Wars, and I left the next morning for Nan, my current location. All I can say so far about Nan is that it is hot. This afternoon, inside my room, it was too hot to touch the wooden or metal surfaces, and I am on the north side of the building.

You might ask yourself, is it dangerous to combine drunkenness, motor vehicles, and water-aggression? The Bangkok Post reported 324 dead, 7074 injured, mostly broken arms and legs, in a total of 3955 vehicle-related accidents. This is in a five-day celebration. These statistics were reported to be down from last year. That is roughly one death per day per million people – not a truly shocking rate, but this is supposed to be a party. I have no doubt that many of these deaths were caused by motorcycles falling over and getting crushed by other vehicles. Surely it is not my place to criticize another country for its exuberance, but imagine 900 dead from fireworks on a long 4th of July weekend. I doubt our system would tolerate such numbers two years in a row.