Sawadipe Mai Chao: A Songkran Adventure in North Thailand

The Thai celebrate their New Year’s in April with the annual Songkran festival which is basically a weeklong party and water fight. Take a North American new years and imagine the exact opposite and you would have Songkran: a chaos filled week fuelled by cheap whiskey, happy people and insane amounts of water. If I got this drenched on New Years at home I would be dead or suffering from a severe case of hypothermia, luckily April weather in Thailand is nothing close to Canada and it was an awesome experience being part of Songkran in the +40 heat. We ended up in Northern Thailand for Songkran which is coincidentally one of the biggest celebrations in the entire nation, needless to say it is not something we will soon forget.

CHAING MAI

Chiang Mai has as many temples as it does people…well maybe not, but there are a lot of temples here so we spent a day prior to Songkran checking them out. After visiting countless temples we went to the Wat Chedi Luang which is a temple that was almost destroyed in the 1500′s by an earthquake. Unlike a lot of the temples we had been visiting, this one was minimally restored with obvious earthquake damage on most of the intricacies of the temple, a very cool place to check out. The city is home to a tonne of history and is surrounded by some of the most awesome sights in Thailand, unfortunately we were not able to partake in many of the activities due to Songkran…see below.

SONGKRAN

Heavy Duty Artillery: Buckets of ice water loaded in the back of a pickup

During Songkran everybody basically puts their life on pause to get into a massive water fight, drink Hong Thong whiskey and party with the pals – whiteys on vacation are no exception. Every guidebook and internet search tells people to go to Chiang Mai for the biggest Songkran party, I think the Thais are paying Lonely Planet a couple dollars so the whiteys all flock to one area, and to be honest, I don’t blame them! Our itinerary ended up landing us in Chiang Mai for the first bit of Songkran so we got a taste of the madness there.

The locals smeared Talc powder paste on people for a good luck blessing

The whole festival is a celebration of life and a cleansing for the new year, which is sometimes hard to take in when some white boy 18 year old backpacker is spraying you in the face with ice water on the way to breakfast. Some jerkoffs ruin it for everyone, and Songkran is no exception – in fact more whiteys act like total ignorant wankers than I care to admit…

Sorry for the rant – anyways the streets of Chiang Mai basically turn into a HUGE watertight from 11:00am until sundown (unless you are in the aforementioned demographic which wasn’t taught to respect local customs by their rich parents) and it is absolutely insane! Anyone and everyone, I mean EVERYONE is a target! Little kids, old ladies, people on motorbikes – if it moves its’ a target, and the water fight is done in a tasteful, chaotic and respectful way (unless once again you are a little shithead spraying moat water in people’s mouths). All people, tourists and Thais alike are have a killer time pretending to be an 8 year old again and soaking each other with smiles on their faces, it is absolutely wild! The best part for us was having water fights with the little Thai kids – they loved it!

Trying to pull off the Easy-E, not as badass with waterguns instead of 9MMs

We Songkranned it up for 2 days and on the second it was cold and raining, but it didn’t deter lots of people from having at it, ourselves included. About mid afternoon the water fight tamed down and a long procession of buddhas made their way on makeshift floats to the centre of town. On the way to their intended destination, the buddhas are soaked and splashed by the locals as part of the real meaning of Songkran. The water off the buddha is collected and splashed back onto the people as a blessing of good luck in the new year, it was an incredible thing to see and be a part of, we got front row spots with the locs, and blew the water fight aspect, pardon my pun, out of the water.

CHAING RAI

After a couple days of getting soaking wet we figured we head to the far north of Thailand to a small town called Chiang Rai where we figured Songkran would be slightly tamed down. We couldn’t have been more wrong. On our way from the bus station to our guesthouse we got absolutely soaked! If you can’t beat them…join them, and the next day we spent wandering the town and hanging with the locals and throwing buckets of water on each other, which was great as the whitey population was highly diluted as most of them were hanging in Chaing Rai.

While we were in Chiang Rai, Songkran officially ended, so we got to rent scooters and check out the coolest buddhist temple we have seen to date, the ominous White Temple. As we cruised to the temple we quickly realized that official dates meant nothing to the locals, so her we were cruising down the highway getting buckets of water thrown at us from trucks going the opposite direction, no wonder over 250 people died and 3000+ were injured during the festival – don’t worry, it was seen as a success as the death and injury rates dropped 25%! Would love to see how that would go over in Canada…

After finally reaching the temple, we were treated to an all white temple featuring crazy guardian statues, human skull sculptures, reaching hands for donation bins and all kinds of other things. The curator of the temple is a Thai artist who has now dedicated his life to building the White Temple which he says represents the suffering people have to go through in order to attain peace. The temple is fairly new, I believe he started his creation in 1998, and thinks it will totally be complete by the year 2070. All in all this is a must do if you are in the region, it is a serious hotspot for locals and Thai tourists alike.

The White Temple from the courtyard

Northern Thailand is an absolutely beautiful place, covered in lush jungle coated mountains and awesome river systems, in some ways I wish we never showed up during Songkran, but I know this will be an experience I will never forget and probably never re-live. The mountains will always be there, but the nuthouse locals with their buckets and firehoses only come out once a year…

Not sure what they were thinking when they chose this pool shape. Bonus points for comments on what it resembles...