สงกรานต - Songkran

I was browsing through my picture collection and came across this set of pictures taken by Guilhem last April during Songkran (Thai New Year).

Songkran festival used to be the celebration held for the Thai New Year, but since the year now starts on January 1st, Songkran is a public holiday. Traditionally, Songkran used to be a time to pay respect to the elders, visit the Wat (Buddhist monastery) and pray. As part of this cleansing and renewal, Buddha images in monasteries where cleaned by pouring water perfumed with Thai fragrance.

The tradition evolved into showing respect to people by gently pouring a few drops of water on their hands or shoulders. But since April is also the hottest month in Thailand, young people were more prone to actually splash each other with jugful of water...


Nowadays, that's mostly what Songkran is: a joyful mess in the streets where people randomly spill water at each other with jugs, hoses, water guns, you name it! To spice it up, some reload their jugs with nearly freezing water, or with water mixed with plaster usually used by the monks to mark blessing... And loads of alcohol.


The first day of the celebration, Marie and I were in Ko Phangan, on the Northern tip, a pretty remote area. There was almost no sign of this celebration going on. Of course we knew it was Songkran weekend, but we didn't really know what to expect. The frenzy suddenly hit us when we reached the main village: we were crossing the island by motorcycle towards the jetty in order to get a boat to reach Ko Samui, and from there a flight to Bangkok. The village used to be very quiet and peaceful when we got there at first, few days before. But this time everyone was getting crazy, yelling and spilling water all over the place! We seriously thought we wouldn't make it through the village on time to catch our boat!

We eventually made it and reached Ko Samui's jetty. From there we took what we thought to be a short bus trip across the island to reach the airport, but it took forever since the roads were crowded with drunk, swamped people!... They even stopped the bus and got in in order to splash the driver and passengers :-) Works better than AC!

The frenzy was even more intense in Bangkok's touristy Ko San Road...

At the beginning we somehow felt a bit oppressed, because we were just passive "victims"... but once we got loaded with small water guns the real fun started to seriously kick in! We were like kids for the whole afternoon :-) Great time, lots of fun!