Photo: Some of the madness on the last evening of Songkran

It’s been a whirlwind of change for me lately! The travel map on the homepage no longer has a nice continuous route - but for good reason!

I just finished up the 4 nights I spent re-visiting Chiang Mai for a special occasion: Songkran! Songkran is Thai (and other nearby Buddhist country’s) new year, and I believe the biggest celebration of the year. The popular tradition is to spend April 13-15th splashing and squirting water at anyone and everyone while partying! It is a wet and exciting 3 days.

I arrived in Chiang Mai after a short domestic flight on the evening of the 12th, but plenty were already eager and celebrating. Traffic was crazy, and I got an earful from the taxi driver because I paid a fixed rate for a ride that now took 3x the time. As soon as I got out of the cab, I was already drenched by some partying locals who poured a bucket over me - backpack and all. I was expecting this! I was told that locals will have zero mercy for anyone trying to avoid getting wet, so I knew to embrace it.

After checking in, I would spend that afternoon the same as the next three days: getting into my most quick-drying clothes, and wandering around getting wet and shooting others with water guns. Unfortunately, I took almost no pictures, as I was trying my best to protect my money and phone from being soaked-through completely. The best I can do is to try and describe the atmosphere.

Along every street, families would gather outside their homes and fill a kiddie pool or bucket full of water. They would dip small buckets into their reservoir and throw the water at anyone passing by: pedestrians, motorcycles, or trucks. Everyone, old or young - but especially the young kids - had water guns that they would use if you were out of range of the buckets. Driving through the town were countless pickup trucks with a group of partygoers sitting in the truck bed with their own supply of water, which they would refill as soon as it got empty.

Along the old town city moat was the heart of the party. Here, traffic was bumper-to-bumper, almost exclusively consisting of these party trucks. Loud music was blasting from nearby hotels that had a speaker setup, and hundreds of pedestrians would walk past, spraying each other. There were tons of smiles and good New Year’s wishes, it was a lot of good energy! In the evening things escalated - lots of large parties, and a couple areas of the city had big music pavilions with local DJs blasting music. Most impressively, this all went on at full-blast for all three days. The energy seemed to be endless, and I quickly found myself looking for refuge in the hotel.

Songkran was a lot of fun! The merriness was infectious, and it was really cool to be somewhere that embraced partying for three full days - it stood in stark contrast to working at Amazon, which recognized only 6 days of holiday per year. I’m glad I got to experience it, and doubly so in the city most famous for its celebrations. It’s very unlikely that I will want to travel to that part of the world again during April (have I mentioned heat and smoke?), so it was serendipitous that I got to knock it out now.

I’ve since flown to Taipei, for the next planned part of this trip. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to try and find somewhere to settle down for a month or two and concentrate on learning Chinese. Stay tuned for whenever I decide to write next :)