Songkran Peace Fight – Chiang Mai, Thailand

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Songkran is Thailand’s new years party. (New years day is the thirteenth of April in the Thai calendar.)

Here in Chiang Mai, Songkran is a giant three day water-fight. Thousands of people take to the streets with water pistols, super soakers and buckets, and turn the city into a playground.

The annual festival is famous, and the guest houses fill up every year with tourists who come specially for the party.

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The beautiful thing about Songkran is that the cultural ideas that underly the festival are all about blessings, renewal, and cleansing.

People party for days, get drunk, run around in the streets chasing each other with water guns, but it’s all good humored. There’s no sense of malice. People are respectful of each other.

The streets stay amazingly free of garbage too. There’s no broken glass, no litter. Chiang Mai is really amazing sometimes. Thailand can be a bit chaotic sometimes, but it’s a peaceful society.

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Things to do at Songkran:

1. Put ice cubes in your water gun. You get more squeels out of people that way.

2. Fill up a kiddy pool in the back of your pickup and turn that thing into a fire engine. Buy a keg, get the family together, pile into the back of the pickup with the keg and the family and the kiddy pool, and do laps of the city soaking and being soaked, until you feel like you’ve been water-boarded.

3. Try and stay away from the moat and the river, because the water in those is pretty rank. There’s probably dead bodies in there from last years festival. Apparently people sometimes get super drunk and drown in there.

4. Keep your car windows up.

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Once the sun goes down, things start to calm down. There’s an ettiquette about Songkran, where you don’t soak people after dark unless you know them.

I went up to one of my fave street food places the other night, and the chef snuck up behind me and poured ice water down the back of my shirt.
‘Happy New Year!’
It was a nice moment. I felt like a bit of a local.

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>> Check out some more photos from my travels in Thailand.
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