Every year around mid-April all the south-east asian countries celebrate their New Year, a raucous 5-day affair where the whole populace gets wet and wild, taking to the streets with super-soakers and buckets of water for the mother-of-all waterfights. In addition to the New Year festivities it's also a combined birthday celebration as in their cultures everyone turns a year older on the New Year, rather than an individual birthday.
Known as Thingyan in Burma, the water festival is an homage to the upcoming monsoon rains that will bring plentiful crops and a welcome break to the 40+ degree daily heat of April. We caught the first day of the festival in Yangon, as we woke witnessing kids outside our window chasing passers-by with buckets of water. One old guy sticks in my mind as I watched him slowly cycling down our road, unable to escape the bucket after bucket of water thrown at him by the excited children. Further into the centre of the city organisation was more prevalent as 'water stations' had been setup on the sides of the roads, which were basically barricades with huge supplies of water and several large hoses for soaking passing motorists.
In fact passing tuk-tuks would often deliberately stop in front of the water stations to ensure their passengers got a deserved drenching, as they had to ride around soaked all day.
Arriving in Thailand, there was much the same if not even wilder parties all over Bangkok - even in our quiet-ish neighbourhood on the outskirts it was back-to-back traffic consisting mostly of pickups laden with supersoaker-carrying Thais... Walking 20 metres down the street to the shop was no easy task and you'd always come back thoroughly drenched and covered in a plaster-type facepaint, which conveys good blessings.
On the final day we decided to take a short walk to see just how crazy it was. Kids and teenagers ruled the streets, many gyrating to boom-boxes in the middle of the road (laden with slow-moving traffic) getting drenched non-stop. The worst places to walk by had to be the people that kept ice in their buckets - quite a shock in 40 degree heat!
One kid had brought his professional drum-kit onto the pavement and was thrashing it like a wannabe Slash. Alcohol flows freely and you hear greetings from all angles, as the usually more reserved Thais greet the wandering Farangs.
Amidst all this madness we stopped to get our usual mango and sticky rice with coconut milk. As soon the lady had prepared it and handed it to Beth, she promptly reached down under the counter and pull out a large supersoaker, hitting Beth point blank in some weird reverse hold-up scenario as I scarpered down the street. Another amusing sight was the innumerable mopeds motoring past, and despite the wet roads and crazy traffic they were not in the slightest bit exempt from the many buckets of water. A few racerboy Thais had completely worn down their back wheels and were drag-racing their lowered peds down the watery streets! We even witnessed a moped with 3 teenage passengers performing a wheelie on the wet road in standstill traffic... fatalities over New Year were down this year though, although goodness knows how.
Our last days in Thailand saw Beth making a firm decision about her new look...
After 2 years on the same hairstyle I was feeling increasingly bored with the dreads, frustrated by how long it took them to dry everytime I popped into the pool/ocean for a swim. Particularly after the water festival where you are continously drenched. So it was time for a change and a new "do". I'll leave you with a few pictures of my conversion from hippy through 80's Tina Turner to Curly Sue.
5 minutes of chopping followed by 6 hours of combing out what was left. It feels thoroughly refreshing to be able to touch the whole of my scalp, and I'm loving the new do :) My head feels so light that I'm sure I can turn it faster!
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