I ventured out of my bare bones barren hotel in Bangkok’s Banglamphu, the Old Town, yesterday early in the afternoon with a view to not getting trenched from the torrents of water spilling in every direction from the third and final day of the Thai New Year’s festival of Songkran, only to discover that the water was being hurled in every direction right outside my front door. I sneaked the 10 metres into a coffee shop next door, only to discover that it was a cannabis shop and it was full of stoners. I sat there and supped my coffee in a somewhat solitary, sullen manner, contemplating that the only place I could avoid getting wet was a cafe full of people high of marijuana. Thailand has undergone some remarkable social and economic progressions recently but it has also become a party capital for hordes of Chinese tourists and this has entailed a more or less informal proliferation of soft drugs including a certain watered down version of cannabis (I am far too old to know the difference between all these different cannabis oils but apparently some are stronger than others as the lady politely explained) and there ubiquitous nitrous oxide balloons the actual health dangers associated with which seem to be most uncertain (most scientists tell you they can be lethal; most people who have tried them say they are harmless fun). I spent an hour or so with the stoners while supping on my latte, just hoping that the third day of Songkran would be a little calmer and more gentle than my prior experiences. It was not to be.
By 4pm I was walking down the street amidst throngs of people so tightly packed that there was a real danger of lethal stampede. Water was raining down in every direction. Some people had acquired large beer barrels and plates and were just hurling water into the crowd. Others were squirting ice cold water from the mains at people. (This is a real shock to the system, even when the temperature outdoors is 37 degrees.) For the most part, however, everyone was packing plastic water pistols or rifles of varying size and some of which were particularly intimidating, each one holding as much as two to three litres of water before you went to refill it at the tap. At the same time as everyone was spraying everyone else with water, people were selling plastic bags of white crumbly chalk that you then mix with water to smear all over their face, hair and clothes as you walk past them.
The situation was becoming insufferable with my wondering what psychiatric damage I might do to myself just by going back to my hotel room and swallowing an entire strip of sleeping pills all at once, and hoping it would be over when I woke up. But I learned some elementary rules. The first is that I reminded myself of one of the cardinal rules of peacekeeping: the best way of avoiding getting shot is not to have a gun. If people with guns see people without guns, they don’t see them as a threat and they presume that they are not the persons they should be shooting. Therefore they are less likely to fire. So having lost my giant water assault rifle from the day before, I determined not to acquire another one. Shooting each other with water pistols is, like all games where you shoot each other with guns, less than zero-sum: you are both going to suffer, irrespective of the outcome. So there is no point in fact having one. If you get blasted, just take the pain and move on. Even the iciest shot to the head will be recovered from in a matter of seconds.
The second thing I learned about this massive exercise in water gun fighting - and you have really never seen so many guns in your life in one place, whether water pistols or otherwise - is that water fired from a water gun has a low muzzle velocity and although the “round” is not heavy, it is certainly heavier than air. Therefore people are very unlikely to hit the target they are aiming at unless they are experts in projectile geometry. Firing a water gun is a little like firing a mortar: you point it at approximately a 45 degree angle into the air, take a shot, see where it lands, and then adjust. So if you actually want to hit someone, as opposed to anyone, you need to be careful and skilled.
Why would you want to hit anyone? Well, yesterday I worked out what this is all really about (apart from getting extremely wet). It is a giant exercise in flirtation. You shoot members of the opposite sex if you want to get acquainted with them, and they shoot you back if they want to get acquainted with you. A number of water gun encounters I saw descend into sloppy kisses and gropes as the rivals expressed their true emotions for one another on the battlefield. It was just such a shame that there was so much fall-out in the interim.
I deposited myself in a bar at about 4pm and reconciled myself to drinking beer all day while getting very wet, having stripped myself of all my clothes except a couple of waterproof bags for essentials, and I found an Italian fellow with a good humour who seemed to understand the nature of the game more than most so I stood and danced with him while he shot various pretty girls from the edges of the bar and they shot back. Occasionally I borrowed his carbine to make my own point but the space we were in became increasingly crushed with people as the music became every louder so that by about 8pm we had been dancing on our feet for four hours and unable to move. By some miracle my favourite curry restaurant in Bangkok is located upstairs on the street where all this carnage was unfolding and it was operating as a normal restaurant serving decent food even amidst the chaos - provided you could get in and out of it. I staggered over the street and up the slimy stairs covered in chalky dirty water and then I slid in and out of a nightclub on the street a couple of times that was in the process of filling up to the ceiling with foam bath, with a foot of sludge on the floor and people careering into one another.
Again I was the subject of more rampantly provocative propositions. By 11pm I realised I had been on my feet nonstop for seven hours amidst all this lunacy with barely and opportunity to sit down and every muscle in my body hurt, as well as being soaked wet.The police had established a series of complex cordons through the area and I soullessly trudged through them to get back to my hotel amidst the continuing elation. By this point I had had two days in a row of military-like conditions of forced enjoyment over huge long hours in the day and I was absolutely exhausted, wondering when I would ever be able to lie down again. I finally reached my hotel room at about 11.30pm or so but that was not to be the end of the night. At about 2.30am I was woken up to the sounds of shrieks at my window as people who were being still sprayed down with water hoses. And they had to go to work the next day. And then at about 4am I was woken up again with the sound of enormous cleaning machines and police trucks cleaning the streets of all people. The authorities had decided that enough was enough and everyone would now be forcibly moved off the streets and the clean-up job would begin. By the time I rose for a third time at 7.30am, I looked out of the window and it was all as though nothing had ever been. The streets were empty, the buses were running, the throngs of maniacs had disappeared and noise had recovered to tolerable levels.
I feel pretty exhausted now, but I have survived Thailand’s Songkran. What shall I do no next? Fall in love with my K-pop star M—, or go back to fight the war in Ukraine? To any sane person the answer is obvious; but I of course am far from sane.