This is Thailand. Chapter 8: Vacation with ghosts. Part 7.

The town looked like a warzone. Despite the 40 degree heat, underaged soldiers equipped with machine guns snuck through the narrow streets among low rise buildings. White tourists using their financial advantage patrolled the streets in their hired pick-up trucks.

Link to the previous post: This is Thailand. Chapter 8: Vacation with ghosts. Part 6.

Suddenly, two enemy units met at one of the intersections. The machine guns spat an unbelievable amount of cold water towards the mobile unit of farangs. “Shit! Shit!” shouted the English as they lobbed plastic bags filled with cold water towards the enemy. I snuck carefully into a nearby shop to buy a loaded gun and handed it to an enthusiastic Apple.

Grabbing the camera, became a war correspondent for a while, documenting the chaos that was around me. A courageous girl went on a suicide mission to the enemy of child soldiers. The unit’s advantage was too great and the crying 3-year old threw down her gun and ran crying to her mother. We won’t win this battle with such low morale of our small warrior. We need to devise another plan. I walk towards the same unit that had hit us before and show them the camera. War correspondents enjoy special privileges on the “front”.

Using the distraction of our adversaries, I throw the camera over my shoulder, grabbed a bucket of ice cold water and poured it onto their unsuspecting heads. Before the enemy had realized what was going on, I was back at the bullet (water) proof Toyota. Not because I was scared of the enemy I must add, but because I was more interested in documenting events which would go down in history as “The Massacre of Koh Lanta”. The street fights lasted for three hours, after the peace was reached without a clear winner. Perhaps one side will win next year.

In the afternoon the fights lost some of their momentum and we used to occasion to take some lunch at a nearby restaurant which was open despite the town being in a battle. Songkran is, of course, more than a three day water-pouring event. The tradition of pouring water comes from the cleansing ritual – a symbolic pouring of water on one’s head was supposed to clean the body and spirit from all evil things that had happened over the past year and guarantee more luck for the coming year.

During Songkran, Thais put special creams on their faces and it wouldn’t be complete without some fortune-telling and visiting of the family. There are morning rituals in the temples, for which we didn’t manage to wake up. A lot of time has passed and, like most holidays in other cultures, Songkran has become trivial and commercial. Today, Songkran is more about having a few days off work and throwing water. Taking for consideration however, that April is the hottest month in Thailand, with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees, it’s not the dumbest trivialization ever.

After lunch we drove around the island. Koh Lanta is a nice place. One road leads around a coast that was covered with coconut palm trees and evergreen hills covered with lush, tropical plants, which I couldn’t stop gazing at. We stopped at several beaches along the way and, for some unknown reason, the sea was still rough and even though they were empty, the beaches didn’t impress me like the ones on Koh Lipe had.

We found a nice bar in a wooden house on stalls that sat in the sea. You could only reach it by boat or a long, wooden bridge that led from the shore. We drank fresh juices while trying not to cook ourselves alive. There was no air-conditioning in the bar and the fan spinning lazily above our heads didn’t provide any relief from the oppressive heat. The owner told us that the Tsunami of 2004 devastated the whole coast here. Luckily, not too many people lost their lives as most people managed to run away to the higher ground of the island. - No one knows the numbers though as many people have never been found. - said Song, the owner of the bar...

TO BE CONTINUED...

IMAGE CREDIT: Nantpipat Vutthisak/Shutterstock