Chiang Mai: Celebrating Sonkgran

Greetings from Chiang Mai, Thailand. We were here to celebrate Songkran, which is the new year’s celebration in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. This year Songkran was officially celebrated April 13^th-15^th, but it seems many Thais take vacation and celebrate for a week or longer.

The traditional way to celebrate involves visiting elders to pay respects, and visiting a Buddhist temple to offer blessings to the Buddha, to make a donation and to receive blessings from a monk. Here Pete is pouring jasmine-scented water onto a statue of the Buddha at Wat Chedi Luang. The water that has touched the Buddha is considered blessed, so it is then poured onto people’s shoulders so that they are cleansed and blessed.

In this picture the monk is giving a blessing to a Thai man. The monk has a brush in his hand that he dips in water and flicks onto your head and shoulders. There are also piles of string bracelets in front and to his right. These are part of a practice called “sai sin” that predates Buddhism. We received our bracelets from a monk who chanted while he tied the string, then he sprinkled us with water.



There are over 300 wats (Buddhist temples) in Chiang Mai. We visited perhaps 30 of them throughout our stay. Most of the wats are remarkably similar architecturally. Here is Wat Pan Tao. These sand sculptures are built and decorated with colorful streamers for Songkran. The sand represents the dirt from the past year and these stupa-shaped sculptures are destroyed after Songkran as a purification.



Wrapping with sashes seems to also be part of Songkran. Trees, stupas and spirit houses have special fabric wraps for the new year celebrations. These are the red, green and white sashes at the bottom of the spirit house.



A Buddha statue from Wat Phra Singh (one of the biggest and most-visited temples in Chiang Mai) was paraded Saturday morning. It was on an ornate platform with wheels that was pushed by volunteers from the temple to a square.



These monks led the procession.



At the square were students from the arts college of Chiang Mai dressed in traditional costumes. The men played percussion instruments and the women danced. Check out their fingernail extensions.




Saturday afternoon was the Songkran parade with more than 50 wats participating. Buddha statues were put on trucks and driven through the old city.




Pictured here are the more traditional Thais who wore Hawaiian print shirts and carried buckets with cups, so they could pour water on the Buddhas, and then receive water back from the floats. They also blessed the people at the parade by gently pouring a small amount of water onto shoulders and saying “Sawatdee Pee Mai Tukohn”, which means Happy New Year everyone. Here is what it looks like when written in Thai: สวัสดีปีใหม่ทุกคน.



The parade quickly turned into a water fight! During the four hours that we watched the parade, everyone we saw was completely soaked.



Of course we joined in and were appropriately armed!



Outside of the parade route, the old city streets were also filled with people who were part of the world’s largest water fight. The streets that lined the moat were particularly wet, with people using buckets to pull water from the moat. We saw people diving into the moat and swimming too.



Trucks with families cruised the streets. The trucks had their own water sources: big buckets or trash cans. Some of the water containers had ice in them – being hit with that cold water was quite a shock!



Pete switched from a water gun to a pail, as it was more effective at dousing the folks in trucks as they drove by! The water fight continued for two more days. Being wet felt great, as the temperatures have been in the high ‘90’s.



The kids were some of the most relentless water warriors. The boy and girl were in front of their family’s business (which was closed) and they sprayed everyone who walked past. The two boys threw several buckets of water on us as we were trying to take this photo.



Water guns with backpack reservoirs were very popular amongst both the tourists and the locals! The little girl has Doraemon, the manga and anime robot cat character. In addition to these models we saw Angry Birds, Sponge Bob, Mickey Mouse, Tweetie Bird and Winnie the Pooh.



It may be of interest that the majority of photos in this blog were taken with our waterproof Go Pro camera that we use for scuba diving. It has a fisheye lens, so the photos have a curved aspect to them.

We liked this graffiti painting, and noticed how it echoes a motif commonly found in the Thai wat staircase entrances to the temples: the naga (mythical water snake) is emerging from the makara’s (mythical crocodile/dragon) mouth. The street painting looks more like fishes, and the bigger fish may be eating rather than disengorging the smaller fish – what do you think?