Myanmar: Thingyan Festival 2011

Nothing - nothing - could have prepared Kym and I for Thingyan, the Burmese New Years celebrations last April. We arrived in Myanmar on the evening of the 14th, so we still had two full days of being drenched in the nation-wide water fight that ensued. I didn't know what to expect, arriving in a poor country with such big problems with its dictatorship government. What I experienced was the incredible spirit and playfulness of the Burmese people... and the feeling that I'd never, ever be dry again.


There was no water working in our hotel room - that was the morning's first surprise. Sure, we'd heard that there were sometimes power cuts all over the country. This was different. We didn't have any water!! The man at reception quoted some kind of problem with the water pipes, but we quickly learned that was not the case. The reason that there was no water inside was because it was all being sprayed exuberantly outside. All over the city. A fine excuse, in my opinion. So we headed out into the city of Yangon to face the blaring music and within 10 minutes were soaking head to foot.


Roadside stages had been set up with dozens of people hosing any person or car within range. Kids and adults alike would run up to us on the footpaths, pouring cups or buckets of cold water down our backs or just flinging them at our general direction. Every now and then I'd be drenched by a sudden wave and not realise where it had come from until I looked up and saw the faces grinning at me from the fourth-floor window. Not one person in the city was dry. Everyone was fair game - though I got the feeling Kym and I had an extra target on our heads, being foreigners and all...


...But I wouldn't have it any other way. K-trucks were stacked with dancing people who cheered at the sight of us. Sometimes they blew us kisses before disappearing into a fountain of water, only to come out the other side cheering even harder. It was such a huge festival that there was TV coverage of it all day. We'd barely walked a kilometer from our hotel when the crew from Myanmar International TV interviewed us about the festival. The presenter was really nice and spoke excellent English, although on-air I don't know how much sense I made. I was still pretty gob-smacked by the whole festival.


As we sloshed through puddles and made our way through the city, an elderly lady suddenly pounced on us and shoved bowls of spicy, steaming-hot noodles in our hands. I felt guilty, as everyone else had paid and here we were, foreigners from a richer country getting a free lunch, but no one seemed to mind. In fact, people were glad when we sat down to eat with them. And the lady flatly refused any money. What can you do? Anyway she was a real character, doing a little dance and saying: "Weather hot. Curry hot. Mouth hot. Stomach hot. BUM HOT!"


We hadn't even finished lunch when a bunch of guys invited us onto the back of their k-truck for a circuit around the city. I think they loved the idea of having foreigners aboard their truck, and even though everyone else had paid 20,000 kyats for the ride (around $25 - which is A LOT of money in Myanmar), we were again invited for free. Verbal communication was tough as we knew no Burmese and they only knew a few words of English, but we all had so much fun, yelling out to people on other trucks, dancing, at times almost toppling out the back of the lurching truck, and being sprayed with water all the while. As we passed one stage of hose-wielding fanatics I wondered if the tray of the truck was going to fill up with water. I made particular friends with my new "brother" from Nepal, to my immediate left.


It was an appropriately hot day and there was lots of drinking... and not a lot of it was water! The guys in our truck were drinking slightly-watered down whiskey. I think they forced me to drink some at one stage, even though I'd been politely declining.


The traffic completely stopped moving and Kym and I eventually dismounted and said our goodbyes to our new friends. As we walked between the trucks there were more cheers and "hellos" and blown kisses, and it wasn't long until someone gave us free tickets to one of the roadside stages, so we could hose passersby. We gratefully took the tickets but didn't get around to using them in the end. People were giving us invites to join them left, right and center, but we couldn't spend time with everybody. A group of ladies handed us some mochi (rice cakes) covered in coconut with something like brown sugar inside them, and they were really good, but we were so full by this stage and had to take it back to our hotel at the end of the day.


All day people were calling me their "brother" and Kym their "sister", or that Myanmar was our country too, or that we were also Burmese. One of the guys on our k-truck even said, "Myanmar: no problem. No problem." Yes, he was drunk, but it was an interesting thing to say about a country which has obviously had some pretty big problems. The longer I stayed in Myanmar, the more I understood these comments. The people in Myanmar want people from other countries to visit them. Their government might be trying to contain them, but they want to be a part of the world, not just their own country. They don't want to be forgotten. And the spirit and generosity of the Burmese people is absolutely, indescribably mind-blowing.



Don't book package tours. Independant travel is the way to go. Support the people, not the government.

Click here for Part Two, the final day of the festival!