Songkran in Phuket
By those new to Phuket, you are often asked, “Where did you celebrate Songkran?” And then they’ll go excitedly into a story about how they spent the whole day in Patong and shot everyone with water and got drenched and had the best day of their life in the world’s biggest water fight. However, should they be foolish enough to ask a long-term expat what they did over Songkran, they’ll get back a bitter response like, “I hid in my house over the entire benighted period. Thank the gods the whole blasted thing is over for another year!”
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which group I fall into. I wasn’t always this way though, the first few years I was out there in Patong with the rest throwing water and having water thrown on me. This was in the days just before everyone carried a thousand dollars worth of hydrophobic electronics in their pockets and before I had to worry about things like getting to a job on time in a presentable condition.
The first year that I really hated Songkran was when I had started working at a hotel. I was in the sales department, and I had to work over the holiday because it was a pretty busy period. Like most of the foreign staff at the hotel, I always came to work already dressed in business clothes. So, I got up at 7:00 in the morning dressed in my nicely pressed shirt, pants, nice shoes and belt. I got on my bike and took off for the hotel. I figured that surely they would see that I was just a working stiff and unable to enjoy the party with them.
I sped through the first few of the water fights along the road, dodged a few others, and then, about halfway to the hotel, a huge blast of water hit me as I was driving full speed down the road. It almost knocked me off of the bike. I recovered without falling, but I had to slow down. That’s too bad because I was immediately surrounded by the baby powder brigade, who covered me in cheap smelling white and pink powder from head to toe. I spent the rest of the day freezing in the air conditioned office greeting guests looking like a moron. I had finally dried out by the late afternoon, although I still stank of baby powder. On the ride home I was again assaulted by water throwing and baby powder covering mobs. What a wonderful day it was.
The second year I had learned: no one is spared; there is no reasoning with the mobs, business suit or bathing suit, you’re going to be assaulted. So, I packed up my work clothes in a plastic bag and put on the bathing suit. I got up extra early, rode to work slowly, and was completely covered in ice-water and baby powder on multiple occasions. But this time I was prepared: I went into the staff showers, washed the horrible powder out of my hair, changed my clothes and arrived to work, just as on any other day, except that it had taken an hour instead of 30 minutes. Whatever, I had beaten them! I didn’t need to freeze. I still looked like a professional. A day later I had developed a terrible case of pink eye. Apparently much of the water that they throw on you is far from clean, eye and ear infections are a common consequence of getting covered in sewer water—who would have thought it!
The third and last year at the hotel I rented a car. I had to rent a freaking car for 1,200 THB (more than I earned for the day, by the way) just to put in a day’s work without getting doused in freezing sewer water before.
Since then I’ve learned that there are three strategies that those in the know employ over the “holiday” to endure it:
Those who like to get wet are a rare breed, and I only know one or two that have been here for more than a year or two and still go out. One of the those who does, does the whole thing. He rents a big truck, fills the back up with big blocks of ice and water in large plastic garage cans and rounds up a bunch of Thai kids and goes out the whole day to win the water war. He also starts himself on a daily course of 200 milligrams of ciprofloxin a few days before Songkran to avoid infection—wonderful!
Most of my Thai friends simply retreat to stay with their families. A few days before the mobs emerge onto the streets, they have booked their tickets and flown to safety back into the mountains, forests, and fields to stay with their parents and grandparents, nieces, and nephews, in what, I imagine, is a specially prepared fortress with no running water within at least 1 kilometer. Some of them have taken the retreat so far as to always leave the country over Songkran, which seems like a reasonable precaution.
The last and largest group is the bitter, poor farang cohort. Lacking a family home nearby to run to and too poor to travel internationally to avoid the mayhem, they stock up on a day or two worth of food and shelter indoors, emerging to see the sun again only after the horror of Songkran has passed.