Festivals in Thailand

Each November the town of Phimai, along with the Tourist Authority of Thailand, hosts a magnificent festival in celebration of the region's cultural history. The occasion offers visitors plenty of entertainment and a chance to delve into Northeastern Thailand's cultural roots.

Deafening fireworks, raucous drums, colorful flags, floats and flowers, the pungent smell of Chinese herbs, and a procession of trance-induced young men and women, bodies and faces punctured by objects as diverse and bizarre as swords, mechanical tools or plant life...welcome to Phuket's Vegetarian Festival!

During Songkran everyone is armed. Old and young, all have buckets, bottles, hoses, urns, water guns and even the fire tender is on hand to add to the total sum of water.

As with many traditional festivals, the Thai festival of Loy Krathong, known as Yi Peng in the north, has many conflicting explanations of its purposes. Is it a Brahmanic rite honoring the dead? A plea for an end to the rainy season? A celebration of the end of rice planting? An act of repentance for dirtying the river, an act of homage to the River Goddess Mae Khong Kha, or worship of the heavens generally? Is it a way of ridding oneself of bad luck, or the accumulated sins of the year past? Or is it merely another excuse for fun-loving Thais to whoop it up?

"A Full Moon Party is not an event," he explains. "It's a happening. There are no controlling organizations, no Full Moon committees. Everybody knows, 'I'm going to the beach, I'm going to party.'"

Hardly a fortnight goes by in Thailand without some kind of celebration, traditional or otherwise. This is not an exaggeration. The Thais celebrate their royal family, flowers, departed kings, their constitution, Buddhism, children, teachers, fruit, and elephants. They celebrate three new years. And, during their most unabashedly gleeful holiday, Song Kran, they even celebrate being soaking wet.

Imagine this scene: scads of Clampett-like hillbilly families crammed into the back of pickup trucks, chugging along in bumper-to-bumper traffic and squirting water at other vehicles and pedestrians. The water warriors use squirt guns, super soakers, hoses, buckets, garbage cans and anything else they can get their hands on in order to disperse their liquid ammunition. Drive-by squirtings everywhere.

My trip was billed as 'Bangkok and Beyond.' A more suitable title would have been 'Bangkok and WAY Beyond.' Traveling in Thailand offers the dedicated traveler an unrivaled cultural experience in a land where the word exotic still means something.

People come from the far ends of the Kingdom even foreigners pour in bus and train loads from the likes of Bangkok and Chiang Mai. They all come to see what Asia's largest animal - the lovable elephant - can do and they rarely go away disappointed.