Madness in Mandalay

In a town that heats to around 40c every day, Mandalay goes a little crazy at new year when the water festival provides everyone a chance to cool off by throwing water around. Without experiencing it however, it’s difficult to imagine the scale of what we lived through for 5 days, but let me try to paint a picture.

Imagine yourself walking down the street, any street, and every child on that street has a hose or water pistol to soak the innocent passer by, young and old alike. They spy a tourist and make every effort to get you wet, even if that means crossing the street and dodging traffic. A few metres later, a little old lady with a huge smile comes out from her shop with a cup of water to pour over your head. Then a couple teenagers see you approaching and fill their 4 litre buckets and toss the contents at you amid laughter at scoring a tourist. As you contemplate just how drenched you are, a jeep passes and launches another couple of gallons at 40kph with deadly accuracy! And all of this happens in the first hundred metres!

If all this is not enough, you can wander down to the old palace where the festival is in full swing. Here throngs of people in mostly open jeeps carrying 15 or more dancing people, drive around and around for the entire day drinking and being hosed down by water cannons setup on the many stages that blare distorted techno pop music. The cannons are sucking stagnant water from the moat, drowning the recipients and filling the streets with six inches of water. But it doesn’t stop there, the putrid water flowing down the street is then scooped up by children who proceed to throw it over you again. And this goes on for FIVE days!

OK it was fun for the first few days where we participated with our own water pistols and visited the stages. With so few tourists, we were constantly being dragged off to dance with the locals and of course, would become the primary target for the water cannons. The only people exempt from the madness are monks. Is there something wrong with using a monk as a shield? And yes that is me, (Adam) wearing a Longie (mens dress) as I get hosed down by a family in the picture above. I needed something else to wear after I destroyed a pair of shorts. When shopping in Mandalay the largest size they had would not even go past my knees, much to the amusement of Jennifer and the ladies in the store. What made it worse was the fact that the men tie them off in a knot at the front, and the larger the knot the more of a "man" you are. Well due to my larger size I could only muster a small knot. Again to the amusement of all the men who repeatedly offered to retie it for me.

I don’t know how the locals maintain their enthusiasm for the water festival for so many days. On day four we basically hid in our hotel room and by the end it was hard to fake a smile as yet another bucket of water gets thrown your way. We did manage to meet some great people from Canada and Australia who joined us on some expeditions out of town. (Not that we were able to stay dry on these either). The first was a relaxing trip down river to visit temples and villages. The next day was a wet tuk tuk drive to a monastery, a visit to an ancient walled city and finished with a relaxing stroll across a 1.5km long teak bridge for sunset.

New years day finally arrived and we would be able to travel dry, so we packed the kids and set off in yet another pickup bound for the mountain villages.