Songkran Chapter 2: The Soakening

The second day of the Thai new year has left me feeling totally wet, parially whacky, but mostly exhausted. I’m currently licking my wounds which include a banged up knee and a couple of fire-ant bites. After being repeatedly and relentlessly doused with 800 year old moat water I have also decided to pop a Cipro just in case some mythical Thai bacteria is unsheathing its ceremonial sword in my intestines.

I spent a couple of hours circling the moat in the back of a Tuk Tuk with a few friends from the guesthouse. I was armed with a pump action gun that quickly broke. Luckily its replacement, another pump action with five lateral squirt holes, worked just fine. In fact, with the rake of water that it sprayed I had the option of either moistening an entire group of people or, by turning the gun sideways, soaking just one from head to toe. Of course, the gun is no match for a plastic bucket full of ice water which was a real favorite among those parading around in the back of pickup trucks.

It was all out war of course. Even the child monks unarmed in their safron robes were not safe in the bed of their own truck. It’s amazing how much fun dumping water on strangers is. I never got tired of it. I even started offering some folks the choice of the blue bucket or the green bucket and then proceeded to give them both.

While walking around by the moat during my second expedition I looked out along the banks to see thousands of little plastic buckets being tossed into the water on strings and hauled back in. It was like watching a desperate and disorganized chain gang: little buckets splashing down, being pulled in, and immediately thrown into the street on whatever car, motorbike, or passerby happened to be in the range of its filthy spray. There is something mechanical and yet completely chaotic about this process -- like THE UNIVERSE.

And the Thai people, rightfully, love getting us foreigners. I was walking down the alley this morning, after being gang-soaked by the waitresses at my favorite breakfast place, when I heard some children shouting the Thai word for honky, the little squirts chased me down the alley and had me begging for mercy at the bend in the road. They ran out of water and were embarassed my tears and eventually left -- I swore revenge and dragged my soggy ass home.

Of course, the honkys get totally carried away and the doors to the macho monkey show are blown wide open. I watched as some fridgenormous Scottish guys tackled each other into the moat; when they grew tired of that, they started tossing each other’s girlfriends into the moat, guffawing and cracking open beers, tossing buckets of water into the face masks of passing motorbikes.

What was probably once a decent holiday of respect and ablution somewhere along the line got a shot to the face from a plastic water gun and became an irreverent psycho swamp party.