Water and Rockets

Water and Rockets

Two Spring Festivals

One of the ways to experience Thailand’s rich cultural heritage is through its festivals. This post looks at two spring festivals that are celebrated all over Thailand, but may look rather different depending on the part of the country you are in. My information is based mostly on how I experienced the festivals here, in a small village (3,000 people) in northeastern Thailand.

The Songkran festival takes place in mid-April, the hottest time of the year, toward the end of the dry season. It dates back to an earlier lunar calendar that had the New Year start in spring rather than the middle of winter. This year, the actual holiday (April 13^th) fell on a weekend, so the next working day was declared an additional holiday and Songkran lasted for five days, April 12-16, 2013. The long weekend gives families time to get together for fun, relaxation, and rituals. Many people visit the local temple to make merit. In earlier times, an important part of the celebration was the water blessing, i.e., pouring water over the hands and feet of loved ones, especially one’s elders, to wish them good luck, good health, long life, and so on.  The water is often scented with flower petals, as you see in the image below. Members of my host family poured water on the hands and feet of relatives who had come from a distance to visit them, and I was included in the ritual as well. 

Although the custom of water blessing is still practiced, it is not what’s publicized. Songkran today seems to be mainly about throwing water – TV news even shows reporters getting splashed while they are out on the street doing their job. In my village, people drive around with a barrel of water in the back of their pickup truck, looking for someone to throw water on.  They also have water guns and water pistols. Children stand at the sides of roads with plastic dippers and buckets, throwing water at passing cars and most especially at motorcycles and pickup trucks with riders in the back. A few students came by our house specifically to throw water on me – though I must say, they were very gentle about it and didn’t throw it in my face. We were warned to keep our cell phones and cameras wrapped in plastic, and it’s good that I followed that advice because I got drenched several times. That’s also why I don’t have photographs of Songkran in my village – the camera was always in a zip-lock bag! The following link will take you to a quick overview of how Songkran is celebrated in several Thai cities and provinces:

http://www.tm.mahidol.ac.th/eng/academic/download/SongkranFestival.pdf

Unlike Songkran, the Rocket Festival or bang fai does’t have a fixed date. It is celebrated in late May, just before the start of the rainy season; the date is set locally. The word fai means fire or light; bang refers to the cylinder (traditionally made of bamboo) to hold the powder that is ignited to launch the rocket. The festival goes back to a pre-medieval practice that my host family told me was about bringing rain. In our village, the festival began with a parade that passed our house at about 9:30am, on its way to the rocket-launching site. Everyone who is anyone – the village headman, the vice-principal of our school, other community leaders – was part of the parade. There were parade-marchers in traditional Thai costumes, some in ordinary clothes, several women wearing strings of wooden phalluses, and quite a few men wearing skirts. How the gender-bending aspects of the celebration are connected to the bringing of rain and fertility is unclear to me, but there they are.  One man who stopped to chat with my host family during the parade grabbed a skirt and wrapped it around himself before leaving to watch the rocket launches.

 

 

The rocket launcher was erected on the grounds where our weekly market is held.  Rockets were shot up at irregular intervals. The men setting up and firing off the rockets took their time, which is doubtless a good thing-- the rockets use black powder so can be quite dangerous.

As for watching the launches and the rockets’ vapor trail, I’m sure it was very interesting to spectators who knew the rockets’ owners and could track which rocket had gone the farthest. That part was over my head, literally and figuratively. Besides the rocket launches, there were snack stalls, a band with cross-dressing dancers, a few people dancing, and a lot of people drinking beer.  It was a brutally hot day. I left after getting drizzled with beer that someone threw onto the awning I was standing under.

The Thai Tourism Authority publicizes bang fai festivals in various cities in Thailand and in neighboring Laos. I don’t know if the parades in those locations look like the one in our village but I doubt it. The festival here is for the village, not for tourists, and as such, is perhaps more authentic than festivals you would see in larger cities. Which I suppose is just to say that when you’ve seen one, you haven’t seen them all.