Songkran Festival 2011: Koh Samet and the Art of “Going on Holiday”

This week has certainly been an eventful one. Monday brought about a pretty epic bought of food poisoning, source still unknown. Think it was bad butter/toast combo for breakfast on campus. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been quite that sick in my life, but I guess there’s a first time for anything. Ironically, I chose to only bring one dose of my anti-bacteria medication leftover from Semester at Sea. My rationale being, I suppose, that I never once got sick on that adventure, so how bad could it really be out here in Thailand? Har har har…

Thankfully I was feeling well enough to go to school the next day to teach and help out with the Songkran Festival for the kids. The short week made for a good review week for the students, and I came up with a Jeopardy-style review game to go over all the material we’ve learned thus far in class – the kids loved it! Hopefully I can use the same idea for my 1^st graders in the fall.
Sarasas celebrates Songkran every year by canceling afternoon classes and having the students put on a cute little parade around the campus. The teachers and administrators get perfumed flower-water rubbed on their hands and flour-paste painted on their cheeks in celebration of the Thai New Year. Then the kids get to go crazy with a campus water-war! This definitely gave me my second wind – nothing helps a lingering fever quite like getting soaked with cold water from dozens of student’s water guns. Plus getting to spray my students was pretty great as well 

Ms. Kim and I

Louis and I - He's a teacher's pet :)

These Hawaiian-style shirts are a Songkran tradition,
and seen EVERYWHERE during the holiday

Water Madness

Post water fight

After changing out of my soaking wet clothes, I met Dan and his girlfriend, Natalie, at the driving range for a bit. Natalie just got back from a scuba diving trip to Borneo, and her stories make me itch to run and get my scuba certification as soon as possible!


Wednesday morning I decided I felt rested and good health enough to make my trip to Koh Samet. I had purchased the bus ticket the previous weekend, and my bus was set to leave from Khoa San at 8am. My air-conditioned mini-bus takes travelers all the way down through Rayong to Ban Phe Pier, where all the ferries leave for a variety of islands. The roundtrip ticket I bought included both the bus and the ferry, and was only 600Baht ($20.00).


I figured that I’d find a bus full of backpackers to chat it up with on the drive to the pier, but ended up having the bus all to myself on the drive down! Hundreds of Thais also made their way to the pier, most traveling the back of pick-up trucks, armed with water-guns and massive barrels full of cold water.


--Let me take this moment to emphasize JUST how epic and widespread this phenomenon of Songkran really is. The holiday is three days long (seven in Chiang Mai), and I’m not kidding when I say that it is probably these three days alone that keep the plastic toy water-gun industry in business. EVERYONE – child, adult, men, women, drivers, tourists, etc – has a water gun, and absolutely EVERYONE is a target. Pick-up trucks of teen Thais chuck bowls of water at each other and people on motorbikes stop at random stalls on the side of the road to get sprayed by hoses and have flour paste painted on their faces. Living in Thailand during Songkran is like living in a water park… any form of transportation is a “ride,” and if you go absolutely anywhere, at all, you are going. To get. Wet.

Perfumed flour paste is sprinkled on just about everything...

  We made it to Ban Phe in great time and hopped on the ferry for Koh Samet. I started to get that familiar exhilarated feeling of being on a boat with a tropical destination ahead, something that never gets old to me. The ferry ride was an hour long, and as we took off I looked around at my fellow passengers. A group of Thais (or maybe they were Philipinos…) in the front broke out a bag of freshly cut watermelon and pineapples and started snacking – someone passed me an offering dried mango rolls to me, I took one and passed them along the line. A cute couple got comfy and cracked open a couple cans of Leo beers in the seat next to me. A family of Chinese (or maybe they were Korean…) immediately got out their cameras and started capturing photos of just about everything. A father held on tight to his baby son as the little boy stuck his head out of the ferry and waves his hands in the wind, like a puppy in the passenger seat. Four Indian men (perhaps they were Punjabi…) opened a bottle of 100 Pipers whiskey and started mixing it with apple juice, clinking plastic cups and talking excitedly in Tamil. An old woman laid herself out in the middle of the boat, her bare feet catching the ocean spray.

I looked around me and had to smile. Though I may never really know where any of these people are from, one thing rang undeniably true: The act… no, the art, of “going on holiday” is most definitely a worldwide, cross-cultural ability.

I decided to find accommodation once I got to the island instead of book ahead, knowing that I’d have options everywhere. I would have loved to stay more than one night, but I knew the prices for everything would be jacked up high for the holiday, and even my small bungalow resort was a rip-off for one night (1000Baht, $33.00 – for those keeping track, this means that roundtrip transportation and accommodation for this island getaway really only cost me about 55 bucks. Not shabby, though still more than anyone would have to pay for a low-season trip.). I stayed at the Samed Resort, cute little beach-side accommodation located on the north beach of the island, Ao Noi Na.

Samed Resort

View from my bungalow

     After a couple hours exploring my beach and the surrounding areas, I settled in for lunch (chicken red curry with rice and a cocktail – delicious) with a pretty spectacular view. After lunch I made my way to Had Sai Kaew (Thai for Diamond Beach), the popular, rowdier beach of the island. More water fights, more painting of the face, etc., were found here, except nowhere to the Bangkok’s level of intensity. The island’s water is a precious commodity here, and any resident who wants to participate in the water festivities has to purchase a barrel to have imported onto the island.

Another bungalow resort nearby

View through the restaurant of one of the resorts

My view from lunch.

chicken curry, a cocktail, and rice in the shape of a heart...
could it get any better!?

I relaxed a bit with a 100Baht pedicure and found a local bar playing great music to sit and sip some Chang and people-watch for a while. It was there I made friends with Craig, an older Englishman who was babysitting the pub for his friend while they were on holiday. His friend Jack came by and the three of us chatted for a while, trading travel stories from India (breathtaking) and opinions on the fate of England’s futbol team this year (heartbreaking). 7pm came around and I headed back to my side of the island in search for a fire dancing show.


Though no fire show was to be found near my resort, I did find two nice Canadian women, Christy and Sandy, who were staying on the same beach. I sat with them for a while and we played pool over pineapple shakes. Both were teachers as well and, ironically enough, Sandy has worked for Sarasas before! She had some useful input, and Christy gave my her expert advice on what to do next time I’m on the island – best places to shop, best bars, where to end your night (at Silver Sand, next to the Thai lady who cooks up fresh burgers and hotdogs at stand till 3am – wonderful.), where to go snorkeling, which boat trips to take –and which to avoid. We talked late until I decided to head for bed, the perfect end to a short yet beautiful trip to Samed.

My ferry left at 11:30 the next day. One iced coffee and THE best banana pancake of my life later, I was headed back to Ban Phe. Every seat was full for the trip back, which ended up taking close to 5 hours, instead of the expected 3. Mai pen rai though, I was in no rush and was feeling quite content from my little getaway. Not everyone, however, shared my sense of Thai contentment. A French couple, who sat in front of me on the bus, started to panic as we got closer and closer to our drop-off point on Khao San.


See, Bangkok’s style of the Songkran celebration is a lot rowdier, to say the least, than Samet’s… and certainly wetter. We’re talking fire hoses spraying into traffic and entire buckets upon buckets being washed onto every individual on sight, down every road, nook, and cranny – there’s simply no way to avoid it. No problem, except for the Frenchman decided to bring his guitar with him, and no weatherproof case to keep it safe. Not a very smart idea. He proceeded to freak out at the Thai driver in broken French/English, demanding the driver take them to their guesthouse and cursing at the sight of every spraying hose. The driver was starting to lose it as well, confused on why the guy was freaking out on him and unable to stop anywhere but the scheduled destination.


I tried my best to play peacekeeper, trying as nicely as possible to explain to the Frenchman that a.) our driver could not speak English, so yelling at him was futile, and b.) the Thai aren’t out to disrespect your property. Just show them you have a guitar and say “please no water” and most likely, they’ll find some other part of you to get wet and spare your precious instrument. I wanted to tell him that if he really wanted to keep his guitar safe he should have left it at home before embarking to Thailand during the infamous “WATER Festival,” but I bit my tongue. Mai pen rai.
Friday marked my final –and wettest—experience of Songkran, when a group of fellow Sarasas teachers and I headed back to Khoa San, the center for Songkran mayhem, music, food, and one hell of an epic water battle.


Six of us piled in a tuk-tuk around 3, and by the time we got to Khoa San we were all drenched (tuk-tuks make the ultimate in-traffic water targets). I armed myself this time, with a plastic water gun that had an alien-shaped water reservoir backpack attached to it – pretty awesome. As soon as you head onto Khoa San, it’s like a real-live version of Call of Duty… only with water, not bullets. The whole street is a battlefield, and every time you get squirted in the ear from any which direction, the urge is automatically to dart around, looking for revenge on the perpetrator. Everyone moves along Khoa San, shooting each other and stopping to dance at random bars that have music playing and chairs to dance on. Those who don’t have water guns have buckets of flower paste, and they waste no time coating your cheeks, forehead, neck and hair with it – especially if you’re falang.


It can be a bit much, at first, having everyone touching you and attacking you with water from all angles, but it’s all in good fun. No one actually aims to hurt or annoy you, and the atmosphere is one of new beginnings and true, joyous celebration. Okay, and maybe it helps that they serve cocktails by the bucket on the street, but you get the point.

Five hours of play, two plates of chicken pad thai, and countless water-gun refills later, we were all spent. I wished every Thai I saw “Happy New Year” (“Sawat-dii bii mai”) on my way to the taxis, and thanked my lucky stars I got the chance to be here, in Thailand, for this epic and amazing holiday.

(some send-off images...)