Chiang Mai - New Year Celebrations!

Happy New Year - we have just went through 3 day New Year celebrations - Songkran - in Chiang Mai - in the north of Thailand. Honestly the celebrations can only be described as pure madness. The whole trip started in a mad way - we could not buy tickets for train since they were booked out for weeks ahead but finally managed to get tickets for a bus. We managed to board a bus from Bangkok right before the start of celebrations and hit the road north together with millions of Thais. Therefore we spend HOURS in traffic jams on highways and arrived after almost 18 hours of sitting on the bus. In addition to the traffic jams our bus only resembled a bus from outside. Otherwise we had to stop every now and then to repair the gearbox (3rd gear was the highest our driver ever managed to use).
By the time we arrived in Chiang Mai the celebrations were in full swing - since the bus was in desolate state in dropped us a bit out of city where we were picked by several pick-ups (seems everybody has a Toyota pick-up in this country), loaded on the back of them and then consequently flooded with water every two minutes. The good thing is that it is 40 degrees here so it just cools you - though most of the times the water is first cooled with ice so the splash becomes relatively chilly. To put the story short - it was impossible to stick your head out from hotel not to become wet - on every corner "danger" was looming, every single pick-up was loaded with a huge barrel of water waiting to be graceful thrown on you...

Anybody, who has been to Thailand during Songkran knows what I am talking about - we have recorded the sample of the madness...

The second highlight of our festivities was sending to space a hot air balloon - we have seen them flying in the sky and decided to make some investigation since if you send a balloon you can make a wish and we had two (though I cannot tell what they were). Firstly, we found out where we can buy one (to our surprise we learned that it is a paper "object" heated by a relatively big candle). Secondly, for some reason Rita came to the conclusion that they are to be sent from the temples. So we walked through the whole city to our favorite temple which at that specific moment was in the middle of a market. The temple was a perfect example of Burmese architecture - wooden one. We managed to light up the candle and had serious problems with holding the paper hot air balloon but it did not want to lift itself in the air. On one side of us we had parked cars, on the other the wooden temple and 50 meters in the direction of wind - hundreds of people - and the balloon did not want to lift itself up. We asked for help but the balloon decided to go up a bit and make an emergency landing on the back of one of the pick-ups. We saved the pick-up by having a local jump on the back of it - also the balloon was saved...Then it finally took off - right in the direction of the wooden roof of the temple. I was terrified - the prospect of fire made my heart almost jump out. The temple would have burned down in 60 seconds since it was anyhow as usual 40 degrees...Finally the balloon managed to miss the room and started ascending - it did so at least for another 10 minutes...our hopes of fulfilled wishes were high again - then being quite far away from us it somehow lost its urge and started a quick descend - we however, do not know whether it crashed or just decided to take a flight corridor not so high - perhaps our wish will still come true...

By the way - it is year 2551 and Songkran is a great time to explore the evening market in the middle of Chiang Mai where you can try zillions of local specialties and afterwards get a foot massage - all right on the street - what we did and what we encourage all of our readers to do once in Thailand...