Water: Boats and Battles
The theme of this post is water. It needs no more introduction.
Songkran: a 10-million person water gun fight
Glossed-Over Historical Context of the Holiday
Songkran is the Thai New Year. It is celebrated April 13-15. Festivities take the form of closing nearly all businesses and drenching everyone around you with water. For the three days a country-wide water gun fight erupts.
Similar festivities happen in the neighboring countries as the Thai New Year is synchronized with the Buddhist New Year, and that is about the same time as the Hindu New Year. The whole Southeast Asian sub-continent partakes in celebrations and water gun fights.
In the Buddhist calendar the year is 2566. Year 0 is synced with the Bhuddha’s death. Fun fact: the new year doesn’t change on the new year celebration, rather with the Gregorian calendar on Dec 31st. So before the new year celebration it was 2566 and now, after a three day party for the new year, it is still 2566.
I have no qualms about the celebrations not matching with the changing year however; Songkran is celebrated about the hottest part of the year it is around ~100 degrees F, or around 37 C in the afternoon. Having a giant water gun fight where you get soaked with ice water is not unpleasant.
How I imagine Songkran started.
Whoever matched celebrations to their respective holidays got this one about right.
Downloadable version: perfect for classroom use
A massive water gun fight would be much less fun on Christmas than in the 100 degree Thai heat.
The Celebration
The celebration is a city-wide water gun fight. It is hard to understate how big the party is or how much fun I had. The entire city celebrated, everywhere you went there were kiddie pools on the sidewalks with people lounging in and around them and using the hose that filled them to spray passing pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes. There were also roving pickup trucks with giant water-tanks in the back and 4-8 people siting around the tank with buckets, ready to soak anyone that drove or walked within range.
Image 1: A roving pickup. The people in the back are surrounding a huge water tank.
Image 2: Another roving truck, this one with a massive speaker system that created a party wherever it went.
But some places were particularly busy. These places closed off roads to vehicle traffic and instead were packed shoulder to shoulder with people and water guns. One such place was Khaosan Road. Khaosan is a major party locale, a 400 meter long stretch of street with bars as the only business, blaring music onto patios and dance floors.
Images from Songkran in and around Khaosan Road:
The video is from the 2nd day of the celebration on Khaosan Road, when the police capped the 400 m stretch of road at 15,000 people. The first day a reported 50,000 people crammed into the area. It was already pretty full so I couldn’t imagine 3x more people in this strip being an enjoyable time.
I did not attend the first day due to the combination of a hangover (the partying started the eve of Songkran) and digestive issues. I have not had food poisoning on my trip, until this festival. I wrote a sonnet about my experiences that you can find below, but please be warned this is a sonnet about a belly ache and is somewhat graphic so feel free to skip this part of the post.
-
This is your final warning.
Maybe maybe it was all the booze:
My stomach got quite tight
And I began to projectile ooze–
From both ends it came forthright
Vomit and diarrhea erupted with a riot
Maybe it was the unsanitary water
Maybe it was the street food only diet
Either way, I never got far from the squatter
The colour matched regardless of source
The texture too was the same on each end
Watery with fuzzy bits, a little coarse;
Grey with some green was the trend
I do regret that I’ve penned this
Of this experience; I’d rather not reminisce
[I know the syllable structure is off; iambic pentameter is overrated and I spent far too much time writing this already. Just admire the rhyming scheme.]
Khaosan road was not the only place with barricaded roads and big water fights. To get between the larger celebration areas I took a motorbike taxi, sitting on the back of a motorbike with a driver. This was great fun, because I still had my water gun and everyone else on motorbikes, tuk-tuks, and trucks also had water guns.
This made the entire road a high-speed water fight that felt like midevil jousting.
Image 1: A DALLE-2 generated image of ‘midevil knights jousting with water guns’
Image 2: A hand drawn image of ‘midevil knights jousting with water guns’
Statistics of Scale
I tried to find the statistics on how just how big the party was but ran into some difficulty.
My first idea was to gauge how much water was sprayed by looking at overall water usage during Songkran. This was a great idea, except that factories and business stop so all industrial and commercial water use halts and some 44.7% (over 5 million) people in Bangkok travelled outside of the city during the holiday. In the past water usage has fallen 10-20% during the holiday. Still, if half the people leave and water usage falls by 15% that is a significant per-person increase in water usage.
I also tried to look at water gun purchases. I wanted to show a graph like this:
I found this market report on the water gun industry that surely gives estimates the number of water guns sold around Songkran as opposed to the rest of the year except the report cost USD 2980 to read.
But for $2980 you get two sub-chapters about the war in Ukraine’s affect on the water gun market
1.7 The Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War on the Water Guns Market
8.7 Impact of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine War on the Upstream and Downstream in the Water Guns Industry
Plus four sub-sub-chapters on the entry barriers to the water gun market. Very useful if you plan on starting your own water gun company.
2.2.1 Analysis of Financial Barriers
2.2.2 Analysis of Technical Barriers
2.2.3 Analysis of Talent Barriers
2.2.4 Analysis of Brand Barrier
I decided not to spend 3 months living expenses for a cool graph for this blog post.
EDITORS UPDATE: I emailed the company asking for a free sample of the report and they totally changed the webpage I linked, including the table of contents. There are now no chapters about the war in Ukraine but there are 13 chapters about COVID-19 and one chapter about COVID-18 (chapter 3.7). The sticker price remains unchanged at $2980 but in my email I said I was a student and they offered a discounted price of $1200.
I still did not purchase the report.
Another company has a similar report selling for $4000. This one includes free samples for some of the graphics:
For just $4,000 you can have 150 pages full of high-quality charts like these.
Other Forms of Celebration
Some people didn’t play with water at all — there are 9 sacred temples in Bangkok and I have a friend that went to all of them over the three days. I went to one with her and we poured water over a few statues. It was a very pretty temple but beer and squirt guns are more my speed.
Boat Rides
Stories of a few notable boat rides.
Laos Boat
This boat trip was on the Mekong River from the Thai border at Huay Xai to Luang Prabang. It was a 16 hour journey spread across two days. There was very little to do except meet the other people on the boat, look at the scenery, and drink rum.
This was a fairly large boat that ferried nearly exclusively tourists making the same trip I was. Bringing alcohol onboard was not discouraged, and beer was sold (along with instant noodles) at a shop on board. This led to many drinking games being played and lots of conversations with tipsy strangers.
I met a number of good friends this way including the voice of Artimes Fowl (a fictional childhood hero of mine) in the Dutch dub of the Netflix show. He later took me to celebrate the Dutch king’s birthday on a holiday aptly called King’s Day at a bar in Cambodia.
On King’s Day we wear orange. Also sing Dutch songs and drink beer.
What I enjoyed most though was sitting in the far back of the boat in a section that housed a small kitchen doubled as the smoking area. I set up a chair aimed out the back where I had a 180 degree view of the river.
The air here was incredibly smokey, still from burning season.
The captain’s view. I am not sure how he navigated around the rocks that loomed in the fog.
At one brief and chaotic stop our boat was overtaken by children who swam out and climbed on board to sell bracelets for $1.
Cambodian Boat Ride
This ride was from Battambang to Siem Reap. Battambang is a cozy city of 200,000 and Siem Reap is home of Angkor Watt, a massive ancient temple complex. The boat was much smaller on this trip, only having the space for ~30 people and with only 9 people riding there was lots of space. The captain was also more relaxed and let me sit on the bow of the boat and dangle my legs in the water at one point I also moved to the roof of the boat for full 360 views.
We passed through the countryside and floating villages. The villages were really interesting. Some were entirely on the water and others had some buildings on shore. But the houses actually floated; the difference in height from wet to dry season meant they couldn’t have underwater supports. In these villages the only way to travel is by boat (or to swim) and there are shops, restaurants, and houses just on the water.
This village is floating in the middle of a lake. I guess it keeps property taxes low. My question is how mobile are the houses? Can you just pick up an anchor and move if your neighbor is playing music too loud?
This is a fairly large floating village with some buildings on land, but most floating. It is only accessible by boat. Mail and packages were delivered by the boat I was on and the only electricity came from solar panels.
The countryside was also interesting. Much of the river was covered in a plant — Water Hyacinth — that was grown semi-intentionally. It has some uses in agriculture and can be dried out and weaved into baskets that are sold to tourists. But it was so thick that the boat sometimes had trouble traversing the river and had to reverse a number of times to clear the propellor. It’s also native to South America and can cause some ecological problems as an invasive species.
Siem Reap
The boat dropped me off in Siem Reap. The main attraction there is Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. Angkor Wat is the Guinness World Record’s ‘largest religious structure’. It is around 1000 years old, and one structure of hundreds in the area. It is famous enough that is is on the Cambodian flag.
When I went I thought I was going to see one big cool temple, instead I found a massive area covered in hundreds of temples and structures. The area is the ancient city of Angkor, a capital city of a sizeable empire that kinda disappeared ~600 years ago. I ended up buying a three day ticket and, with some friends, hired a tuk-tuk driver. For three days I spend 6+ hours looking at temple ruins. All of them were historic and unique and after a while it was many hours of looking at old rocks in the hot sun.
Tangent about the world record here; Guiness includes all the area within the moat as Angkor Wat. Most of that area is just lawn or forest, with a temple in the center.
Notice Bayon Temple directly above Angkor Wat, it has a larger moat and area within the moat that is mostly grass. I could build an even bigger moat given a few weeks and an excavator, but I’m not sure anyone would count that as a religious structure. Categorizing Angkor Wat the largest religious structure is only possible using inconsistent and arbitrary measurement.
This doesn’t take away from the grandeur of the temple though. Angkor Wat is one of the biggest temples in the the complex and the sheer number and size of structures taken together is astounding.
Photos of Angkor Wat:
Photos of other temples:
Three days of temples shortened into a few photos. There were temples with faces, temples with water, temples with monkeys (including one that groomed my beard), temples with trees: so many temples. Angkor Wat gets all the fame, but the other temples in the area are just as spectacular.
Some of the temples were under restoration.
Back to boats: Cambodian Island
After taking rides in these boats, I decided that I quite enjoyed it and would like to own a boat. I am looking for a river-worthy 15 foot long or so boat with a cover for the sun. Something similar to the boat in this picture. This would be a lovely way to travel, and going down the Mekong I could visit Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
-
“I want to buy a boat.”
“I won’t sink the idea immediately, tell me more.”
“I can go down the Mekong river and see all the sights. Do you think the idea is anchored in reality?”
I don’t have enough boat puns for any more dialogue
New, the hull can be bought for $300-400 and a motor purchased for $300-400. This is pretty reasonable, and even more affordable if I buy used. The only thing preventing me starting this journey is figuring out what licenses I need to navigate a boat through three countries. This is a significant hurdle because the information is in four different languages that I don’t speak.
While daydreaming about boats, I was swimming in Koh Rong — an island in southern Cambodia — and came across a sunken kayak.
Location of Koh Rong
Non-kayak pictures of Koh Rong. It was a beautiful place with lots of cool creatures.
I spent ~4 hours excavating the Kayak and eventually un-sunk it. I dragged it to shore and nearby there were rocks that had random trash washed ashore, among the trash I found a kayak paddle and lifejacket. I was all set. I now owned a boat.
It was in a little rough shape but it floated and that’s what mattered.
The best use of my newfound boat was on night excursions. Koh Rong is surrounded by bioluminescent phytoplankton (more specifically: chemiluminescence dinoflagellates, less specifically but still technically correct: glowy algae). This led to absolutely surreal experiences at night with the kayak. The kayak also allowed me to find particularly luminescent areas and then snorkel in them.
Pictures I found online of bioluminescent phytoplankton. It didn’t actually look like this. These use photography tricks to make it more visible to the camera sensor.
When I tried to take pictures of it they came out like this. I tried a video while violently splashing in the water. The algae prolifically sparkled in real life, but the camera failed to recreate the effect.
There were a few sparks caught on camera there!
After that I gave up, some things just can not be caught on camera. So I’ll do my best to describe the experience with words; once again in sonnet form.
-
Floating through the sea of constellations
biochemical reactions glitter in orbit
nothing weighing on soul, just satiations
in the surreal realm of the dinoflagellate
Alone in black, a private dream
Alone, except for galaxies of plankton, ephemerally sparking
Alone, except for colonies of stars and their eternal gleam
Up, down, water, sky; the difference has little marking
Pushing through the inky black, a stroke of the arm to swim
thick flecks of shimmer ride each current before making an escape
and a glowing phantom trails behind each limb
the spirit lags behind in the water before returning to shape
Alone, until the sun rises. Boats traverse. Birds awoken.
The spell has broken.
Sonnets. For high highs and low lows.
When I left the island I sold the kayak to my hostel for $20. It was almost certainly worth more than that, but I’m unfamiliar with the stance of Cambodian law on the statement “I found it so it’s mine now”.
SEA Games
SEA stands for South East Asia, but it’s close enough to the water kind of sea to fit in the water theme of this post.
The SEA games is the largest sporting event in the world (by number of medals, admittedly an incredibly arbitrary metric). It is a mini-Olympics with the 11 Southeast Asian countries. This year the games were hosted in Phnom Penh, Cambodia at the same time I happened to be traveling through.
There is no standardized set of games and every hosting country has authority to add sports they would like to the lineup. This year sports included dancing, obstacle racing, two kinds of traditional martial arts practiced almost exclusively in Cambodia (Kun Bokator & Kun Khmer: Cambodia won both) and two kinds of chess - neither of witch are chess as I know it — including one called Cambodian chess. Countries obviously don’t abuse the power of being able to add sports at will.
I attended two football games and had a great time. The first I fought tooth and nail for a ticket in a “line” more violent than any mosh pit or crowd I’ve experienced. Tickets were free but limited and many people wanted these tickets.
The “Queue” and my eventual ticket. This thing took blood, sweat, and tears to get.
The day of the game I showed up a bit early at the stadium ready to find beer and snacks then a good seat. But the stadium had no food, beer, or water sold within it. I went back to the gate and had the following conversation with a gaurd there:
-
“I’m thirsty, can I exit and re-enter?”
“No”
“Is there water in the stadium?”
“No”
“So how do I get water?”
“There is water right there”
(guard gestures to a vendor outside the gate)
(I stare back blankly)
“Ok, but there is no water inside the stadium”
“You can bring water inside the stadium”
“So can I exit and re-enter”
“No”
Eventually I talked my way into leaving the stadium but the guard’s manager had to scribble a note on the back of my ticket. I assume it says I can come back in, but it’s written in Khmer so I’m honestly not sure. I stocked up on 4 beers and a box of fried chicken then entered the stadium and enjoyed the game.
The 2nd game I walked in without a ticket; foreigners were allowed in for games for free without a ticket and the pain of the first ticket was entirely unnecessary. And, without the ticket, foreigners have unlimited reentry. These policies were aimed to increase tourism in Cambodia.
That completes this water anthology. I am finishing my travels in Cambodia for now and headed to Vietnam soon. The original plan was end my trip at the start of June, but I have been traveling below budget and so will extend the trip another month or so before settling down and finding a job.
Join my email list and I will let you know when I publish another post!
