Celebrating Songkran in Chiang Mai, Thailand

While the Red-Shirts are out on the streets of Bangkok, clashing with riot police and clammering for elections, the people of Chiang Mai are storming the streets armed with water pistols, buckets and trashcans filled with ice water. It's Songkran, the Thai New Year, and along every road, Thai children and adults are hoping to share their blessing with a hose or water cannon. But the real action is in the northern city of Chiang Mai, specifically down at the ancient moat that used help protect residents from raiding Burmese. That's where we headed.

Songkran is a three-day holiday in Thailand, April 13-15. What began as the gentle pouring of water over the hands of friends and relatives has evolved into a water fight on a massive scale. We approached the downtown moat area on open-air tuktuks, three-wheel auto rickshaws with a bench seat in the back. We had a trashcan full of water, to which we added a giant block of ice. This made our water blessings a little more of a shock to the system than the warm buckets of moat water.



We were drenched before we'd gone a tenth of a mile. The slow traffic consisted of every pick-up truck in the city, packed with revelers with water buckets of their own, and unfortunate motorcylcists, whose flimsy water pistols were no match for the pedestrians pulling buckets of water out of the moat. Thailand is the land of smiles, and no one, no matter how drenched, seemed to take the least bit of offense from the dousings. Children took particular glee in the freedom to squirt total strangers with water. Coca-Cola took the opportunity to set up a truck with dancing girls, but the dancers got more than their fare share of soakings from passers-by.

They're calling today "Black Songkran" because of the wet blanket thrown over the festivities by partisan violence in the capital and Red-Shirt protests even here in Chiang Mai. But for the hour I spent emptying three trashcans full of water on strangers and probably twice that dumped back on us, Songkran was a blast. To all the kids that got me good, here's wishing you suk-san wan songkran.