Fire and Water 2

So that first rally was all good feeling, at least for us farang (foreigners). It did get a little hairy a couple days later, though, when, following some serious violence outside the ASEAN summit in Pattaya (http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/14885/clash-at-pattaya-protest), some of it showed up in Bangkok. En force.... But only in certain areas. We started the day getting doused in water and white powder for Songkran festivities: people were bathing buddhas, decorating cake-shaped shrines at temples (in sand, too -- we had a lovely time building our own) and splashing, splashing, splashing with all their might, laughing ticklishly and tirelessly like little boys until despite the heat I felt rather tired of being sopping wet.

By the time we were heading home, though, on Sri Ayuttaya, an eye-of-the-storm feeling settled over blockaded streets, army tanks, piles of ash, trash, and tires, and the skeletons of burnt and flaming buses where clearly the riots had passed not too long before. (This video is actually from earlier in the day, the view from a taxi, but you get the picture. Again, Gabby took more video footage -- of soldiers marching past us, of me expressing some half-hearted courage in the face of what started to feel far less giddy and far more scary -- but the files are too damn big.)





We couldn't get home by our usual route, due to blockades and tanks and soldiers, and so we got bewilderingly lost in alleyways and residential areas. Some people laughed and celebrated Songkran in oblivious bliss while others stood around, mute, afraid, fascinated, as gunshots and shouts and smoke billowed a few hundred meters away.

Despite the intrigue, at this point I had a few knots in my stomach. It was getting late, we were getting hungry, we had a night bus to catch to Chiang Mai, and we had no idea how to get home, walking or otherwise. We were uncomfortably close to what was clearly real violence, and we found ourselves quite stranded among hundreds of Thais in smoky, unfamiliar streets. So we hopped on a completely incompetent motorcycle taxi (didn't know he was incompetent until he drove us all over the place, often the wrong way down one-way boulevards, not only because he had no idea where he was going, but also because any effort to go in the correct direction was made futile by police, blockades, burning buses, etc., and eventually he charged us 100 baht to bring us back to exactly where we started).

A second motorcycle taxi driver tried a little harder, and eventually -- just in the nick of time, really -- we were able to get back to our guesthouse, pick up our bags, grab some curry, and head back out to the bus station in a real taxi (read: metered, and with closed windows).

Closed windows during Songkran are a godsend. I remember specifically a moment when, close to our guesthouse, but still far enough away to feel scared and dejected, still damp and covered in white powder from the day's festivities, hungry, exhausted, frightened, hopped up on adrenaline, our motorcycle stopped at a red light. To our right was another motorcycle with mom and dad and a small child in the middle, bearing, of course, a supersoaker half his size. I looked wearily over and saw that with a puckish gleam in his eye he was pointing that supersoaker straight at us. Of course he sprayed, despite our pleas. To escape one kind of violence, only to be subjected to another.... Have mercy!