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  • Day 93

    Songkran Day 1

    April 13, 2017 in Thailand ⋅ ☀️ 35 °C

    Well, Songkran is intense. And incredibly fun! Today is the first official day of the celebrations for the Thai New Year. The last and third day is the New Year itself and is supposed to be the wildest day. Officially, water is only supposed to be thrown from 8 to 8, and is reserved mainly for the main street along the canal. But if course there are a few who don't abide by those rules, tourists mainly.

    So after a hearty breakfast and booze buckets we went out into the thick of it and were soaked immediately. The streets were packed with people and you were able to walk faster than the cars driving along. Some people had water guns, some like myself had Buckets, some had hoses, and others had tubs of water in the back of trucks with ice in them that they threw at the people walking. There were water refill stations everywhere, my favourite one being the fire truck refilling large tanks on the street. And of course there was the canal, water was easy to take from there after we attached strings to our Buckets.

    At some point we ended up at Stamps backpackers where there was water fighting going on in the streets and tons of people partying inside, mid day of course. Wild. I couldnt even tell you how long we stayed there, but at some point we ended up eating at El Loco, the Mexican restaurant before walking back to the guesthouse. We took the back roads in hopes that we'd avoid more of the water fighting but ended up in the thick of it outside a bar where a bunch of children were super excited that a group of people would engage with them. So, we played with them a while before heading back to the guesthouse and showering away all the dirty water. We waited until it was supposed to be safe to go out again and headed for backpackers alley. We didn't stay dry for long... There were inconsiderate folk spraying people in the absolutely packed crowd. I've never seen it so busy! They had a stage set up outside and there were so many people you could hardly move. A couple of us called it quits because of the crowd and took the back roads home again.
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