4 days ago leaving Laos, at the very last minute we changed our travel plans at the ticket counter in a hot, hectic early morning bus station, and headed across the Laos-Thailand border by public bus all the way to Khonkaen, a city 200km further into the North-Eastern Thai landmass and further along the main road towards our daily goal of Khorat, Thailand's second largest city. With a population of over 2 million (and almost no tourists, pretty much ever) we were about to find out something rather incredible and excellent, that each one of these millions of people is seemingly more lovely than the last.
Arriving in Khorat on Saturday we saw, as we had in Vientiane and Khonkaen, the signs of the celebration of New Year in these parts, which I believe to be a Buddhist celebration but I can't check on that so I'll just say, with the only sure knowledge I do have, is that it is one of the myriad and wonderful exercises in/of/good for Sanuk.
Sanuk is the single best thing I have ever heard of, really. It's the Thai word for fun and the most central part of their outward way of life.
The concept of Sanuk is like Western consumerism in many ways, except that it doesn't seem to do anyone any harm and makes people a great deal happier and contented for their constant indulgences.
Sounds too good to be true? Come to Thailand and find out for yourself just how different and superb this idea is.
Sanuk is more than just a word translated from English, a lot more. It is like an ever-present yardstick, a constant level of enjoyment which must be detected and guaged in every activity, and by which the Thais measure the worthiness of everything and anything; from working, to sitting comfortably or lying down, through eating (especially to eating) and drinking and every other activity, great and small, that you can imagine.
If it ain't got a good level of sanuk in it, the Thais will want to do it only as a job or a favour, not for themselves. To say that they have a great sense of fun is a bit like saying Liberace was a bit of a ponce. They particularly like, for example, adopting other country's and culture's celebrations and festivals and holidays as a national excuse for a party.
Got a Hannukah or an Easter or an Independence Day or a St. Patrick's day in your life? Share it with the people of the Kingdom of Thailand and everyone will be better off
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The basic idea of the (Buddhist?) new year in SouthEast Asia is to have a party. In typical style this includes a few quaint and rather silly ideas, yet which are somehow infinitely more endearing than similarly quaint rituals by less good-natured and cheery peoples. You have to go through the usual celestial channels, and do the customary hocus-pocus ceremonies such as offering lots of food and drink to the spirits.
The strong belief in this corner of the planet is that souls, spirits and ghosts hang around the places in which they once lived, and as such every house has an external shrine or stupa or quite literally a `spirit house`, where the immortal essence of those locals whose mortal evidence has long since passed through worms can live in peace and quiet, and even bring good luck to the present inhabitants. These spirit houses are, accordingly, massively ornate and often decked out in mirrored tiles and gold leaf, like a giant pointy rhinestone doghouse to the heavens.
The other main and complimentary activity hereabouts involves setting fire to lots of smelly wooden splinters (incense I think they call it) in the hope that said spirits don't make nuisance neighbour complaints about all the noise and smell and/or possess the soul of Great Uncle Cedric and make him do nude yet violently-incontinent laps of the town square, or anything similarly unseemly.
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But what makes up msot of the celebrations is the largest waterfight known to man, woman or beast and the habitual and total soaking of everyone and everything in an entire city.
It is monumtally chaotic and a truly huge amount of fun, with the streets all full of very heavy but very slow moving traffic mostly made up of pickup trucks with a 50-gallon plastic barrel in the back full of water, and anywhere from 2 to 20 menm women and children sitting or standing and waving alongside it armed to the teeth with water pistols, buckets for wholesale soaking of anyone within range and racks and racks of talcum powder, which is smeared ont he faces of any and every stranger.
Sounds a bit odd, what? Well it's great, unimaginably cool and ecstatically happy on the part of everyone, with a huge, massive sense of goodwill to, of all people, us two wee unsupported farang.
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Man, did that city love us; they assaulted us with smears of talcum powder (good luck for both them and us) and water blessings constantly, I mean constantly, for 5 or mroe hours.
We walked up the line of traffic amid the partying, water-spraying batteries of chicldren in each truck, were blessed with smears of powder across our faces and heads quite literally about 8 times a minute, were blessed more lavishly with full buckets of water - in a full range of temperatures starting somewhere just above zero - that soaked us completely.
Our cameras and wallets were in plastic bags, double or even truiple-wrapped (our one concession to intelligent thinking) and they still somehow got damp.
We would have, with no exaggeration whatever, been no wetter had we jumped into the ornamental lake, which is what a gerat many of the younger citizens actually did.
All this was to the soul-soaring background of cheers of joy, shrieks of happiness, the sounds of 100 sound systems all blasting our dance music of some kind and a hundred thousand people (so it seemed) wishing us `happy new year Thailand` or `hello` or very often just `sorry!` a half-second before they caked our entire faces in powder and/or tipped a gallon of water over our heads, dressed us with garlands of flowers, or asked us where we are from, or gave us glasses of whisky & soda, or just wai'ed us (the prayer salute, a simple yet gesture of friendship and respect) a million and one times.
It was, quite probably, the most fun I have EVER had with my clothes on.
What a day.
What a country.
