Songkran Celebrations and Carnage
Thai New Year nationwide water fights, the '7 dangerous days', and what to expect if you ever visit Thailand between 13th - 15th April...
Songkran marks the Thai new year every April, with public holidays running from the 13th-15th April, plus additional days if falling over a weekend, such as this year.
Traditionally, historically, Songkran has been a chance for Thais to return to their hometowns - especially those working in Bangkok - to see their families and pay respects to their elders. April is the hottest time of the year in Thailand with soaring temperatures. Perhaps that is why water has been involved to celebrate Songkran - with a connection to Buddhism through the sprinkling of water, to signify purification. I have both witnessed and partaken in this traditional form of Songkran celebration, whereby the younger people of the family sprinkle water from a bowl over the hands and wrists of the elderly, as they are seated with their hands held together in a ‘wai’ position.
Over the years, Songkran has become a nationwide, three day water fight (longer in some provinces). I “played water” twice back in the day when I was fresh off the boat, and that was enough. Nowadays, I have grown to dislike what Songkran has become. It is a very dangerous time.
I wrote about Songkran briefly in 2023 because of the opportunistic propaganda put out by the captured lying legacy media about meaningless positive PCR surges in ‘Covid cases’ expected after the water festival had finished. The lapdog media did not disappoint in delivering such headlines.
This year was raucous and wild. I saw a lot of chaos firsthand, as I carefully drove around Bangkok with my wife and friends in our car. We narrowly avoided multiple collisions with blatantly drunken, drugged, and reckless drivers. We also managed to avoid killing scores of foreigners and their children as they ran into the middle of the road around Sukhumvit, oblivious to traffic. Others were not so lucky. Every year without fail, the media trudges out the same headline:
A government spokesperson is quoted, they pick a number out of the air as a percentage for how ambitious they are this year to reduce the number of deaths from road traffic accidents, compared with the previous year’s stats. Deaths are only counted as those dying at the scene of the accident. The real death toll must be much higher than whatever is reported, as it includes those who succumb to their injuries later in hospital. Everyone seems to accept this death surge each year as normal and socially acceptable - as they do for the other seven dangerous days during the standard new year period at the end of December into the first week of January.
The police will make some half-hearted announcements about setting up checkpoints on busy roads to stop drivers and check they are sober. There are usually follow up articles about the drunk drivers either being held for a few hours then released, or able to collect their impounded vehicles the next day from the police station. There are little to no consequences for the motorists. It is also common knowledge that punishment can be escaped with bribes of 500 baht to 2,000 baht+ depending on the severity of the traffic law infringement.
Before the scamdemic, I spent one Songkran afternoon with friends sat outside in the beer garden of a popular pub in Ekamai, Bangkok. We were mostly spared from the water splashing of passers-by. The owners of the pub had setup a hosepipe from inside the bar to a large water barrel outside, for children and teenagers to play with, presumably their families. The youngsters were throwing buckets of water at the cars and motorbikes passing the pub (this is actually standard behaviour during Songkran), but the drivers were likely startled as the kids were not visible from the road, waiting to pounce from the doorway of the pub. There was no traffic cone demarcating the area outside the pub as a warning to drivers to slow down and brace for water impact.
My friends and I warned the teens to stop throwing water at the vehicles as people were driving fast, unaware of the danger that awaited them. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. One of the teenaged girls sprinted onto the pavement and threw a bucket of ice-cube-filled water into the face of a full-helmeted motorcyclist. The rider immediately came sliding off his bike as if he had been clotheslined by a metal bar. His crumpled body was dragged along the concrete road surface for several meters by the velocity of his bike and the fall, before he lay there, motionless.
My longest friend in Bangkok -Jon - a fellow Brit, hailing from a family of doctors, ran over to the scene of the accident and began assessing the young man’s condition. He lifted the man’s visor up from his helmet and saw that he was in a complete state of shock. Meanwhile, the teenaged girl who threw the water + ice, causing the accident, circled the injured rider and said to my friend that she was felt guilty and was sorry. To which my friend replied that she was indeed guilty, and asked, what did she think would happen when she was throwing water and ice into the faces of motorcyclists?
Jon put the man in the recovery position and very shortly after we saw two ambulances arrive at speed, skidding to a halt by the side of the road. As Jon was trying to explain the situation to the first paramedic, we witnessed unbelievable - but commonly reported - scenes as the paramedics from the two ambulances began to have an actual fist fight. They were scrapping over who had the right to tend to the victim. I.e. Who had called ‘shotgun’ and arrived on the scene first. It’s all about the money, as these are private ambulances that compete for business. Sad but true.
Eventually the paramedics settled their rivalry, and the poor young man was whisked away in an ambulance that resembled a repurposed, re-painted ice-cream truck from the 1990s, and all was forgotten.
The kids carried on ‘playing water’ and chucking buckets at other vehicles like nothing had happened. We left the pub.
I have come to believe that the people that throw water at speeding vehicles must know that it is highly possible there will be an accident. I actually think that the whole experience and the ‘will they won’t they’ crash possibility, gives them a rush of adrenaline. In a morbidly voyeuristic way, I believe that a part of them wants to cause a crash.
This year I was content with playing the role of being on sober patrol, as I rarely drink alcohol these days. Moreover, I am becoming less enthusiastic by the day to entrust my life or my wife’s life to a taxi driver. Finding a good taxi driver in Bangkok is a lucky dip - they mostly drive as if they are in the grand prix, except they could be also be wasted. Worse still, as I consume Mark Crispin Miller’s died suddenly articles on a daily basis, I see more and more ‘vaxxidents’ with the now notorious obfuscation of the truth. The fake-stream media articles are always referring to the victims of vehicle collisions as having had ‘medical emergencies’, ‘sudden illnesses’ and so on = they blacked out, had a stroke, or a heart attack because of the C19 EUA countermeasure injection.
Around Bangkok, many Thais have had up to 8 injections - the initial two, followed by six boosters. I kid you not. Therefore, you may understand why I am not keen on being a passenger in those taxis. Hell, many of them still have plastic signs stuck on to their windows with suction cups that read “I am vaccinated against Covid19”. I would say that 99.99% of taxi drivers still wear masks, even when alone in their vehicles; further risking accidents from self-inflicted hypoxia. #StaySafe…
Ah, I digress.
I decided to be the designated driver for our merry little band of brothers and sisters. We had a smashing night out, with lots of dancing and some excellent DJ sets played at a grimy bar that raged on until 2am. It felt good to not be drinking, and to be in control. I needed my wits about me for the return journey, especially as I was dropping off friends all over Bangkok at their homes. We saw party revelers with their water guns, passed out unconscious at the side of the road. Others were still going strong, spraying water at vehicles and pedestrians alike.
As we left Sathorn area, the level of recklessness from my fellow motorists was off the charts. I was cut up by taxis and pick up trucks, watched them go through red lights at every junction, noticed vehicles straddling lanes and passing me at over 120kmph in residential areas. I often think about what my driving instructor said to me in England way back in 2002:
Never make anyone slow down, swerve, or stop. Always make allowances for other people’s mistakes.
‘Mistakes’, right. You need to unlearn everything you learned in the UK, when you decide to get a driving license in Thailand. Actually, most people do not have a license or insurance. Many (estimate 80%) of drivers with a license, have paid a bribe to a friend of a friend of a friend at the department of land and transport. I.e. They did not take the test, but they have a ‘legit’ driving license card.
I’m digressing again, sorry.
Back to my perilous 3am car journey at the height of Songkran’s dangerous days, and we now found ourselves in Soi Thonglor / Sukhumvit 55. This is a very popular road for the upmarket bar-scene in Bangkok. It is also very chaotic, especially as party revelers scramble to find taxis to get home. Straight off the bat, as I crept forward to turn onto Soi Thonglor, a black Honda city performed a death-defying U-turn which ground all traffic to a halt. The driver had misjudged the space, almost hitting the front of my car, then reversed back and hit a minivan, before fleeing the scene. We watched the minivan tear after the hit-and-run motorist, which must have been in vain, as we found him parked up the road inspecting the damage to his van.
We proceeded to gingerly navigate the chaos, with several emergency stops as drunken humans ran in front of our car laughing and throwing water at each other.
On the last day of Songkran, we ran the gauntlet of Sukhumvit by car, out of necessity to escape to a local park. I almost hit a small Caucasian boy who ran into the road, giggling, firing water back at other revelers, whilst the man I presumed to be his father was preoccupied talking to bar-girls. Neither of them turned around. Ignorance is bliss.
The previous headlines I inserted throughout this article were presented without comment, to give the reader a chronology of the death toll as reported by the media. Note the sub-heading in the above screenshot:
“Fatalities up slightly but total accidents and injuries down from same period a year ago”.
Wahoo great job everyone. Were all the accidents, mangled bodies, and deaths worth it, for a few drunken laughs and a massive water fight?
Quoting from the article:
Traffic accidents during the first five days of the Songkran road safety campaign week killed 206 people and injured 1,593 others, according to data released on Tuesday.
The 1,564 traffic accidents reported from April 11-15 represented a decrease of 10.4% from the 1,745 reported in the same five-day period a year ago. The number of deaths was up from 200 last year but injuries were down by 8.3% from 1,737.
On Monday alone there were 301 traffic accidents, 39 fatalities and 314injured people, the health minister said. The most common cause was speeding which caused 43.2% of accidents, followed by drink-driving(23.9%) and cutting-in (15.3%). Motorcycles were involved in 83.8% of all accidents.
Thailand’s roads are the deadliest in Southeast Asia, with the ninth-highest rate of road fatalities in the world at 32.7 per 100,000 people each year, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2018. About 20,000 people, or 56 per day, die in traffic accidents each year.
Rinse and repeat next year then? No doubt.
I think Songkran can be fun and safe for whoever feels the need to get involved, when roads are closed off and people are having water fights on foot, or at events put on such as mini music festivals. It is the water fighting + the alcohol + the drugs + the dangerous driving that causes the carnage. I do not wish to come across like Victor Meldrew, winging about people having fun.
I hope that my point is well made.
Did my Thailand based readers celebrate of suffer Songkran? Let us know what sights you beheld, dear readers.
สวัสดีปีใหม่ไทย Sawatdee bee-mai Thai Krap. Happy Thai New Year!
Nicholas Creed is a Bangkok based writer. All content is free for all readers, with nothing locked in archive that requires a paid subscription. Any support is greatly appreciated.
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All I could think of when reading that is that it's more evidence of the "depraved indifference to life" revealed by people's reactions to the plandemic. Abandoning hospital and nursing home patients; "papers, please" demands to get into movie theaters; shrugging at injection deaths; refusing organ transplants to the "unvaccinated"; and defining "fun" as getting shitfaced with the specific intention of causing carnage in the streets: All those things share the common denominator of a hatred of or a frivolous indifference toward life--one's own, primarily, and the lives of others as the inevitable consequence.
I'm regularly shocked at how many shots people in Bangkok have received - five, seven, eight. It must do something, like maybe a full-body numbing that in some way gives them relief, that makes people want to keep going back for more.
I'm now making monthly trips to MBK Center where there's a Japanese store called Dondon Donki that sells natto. Supposedly it clears the spike protein from the body and there's an older person in my Thai extended family who is petrified of ending up like friends who got injected.
The kids stepping into traffic to throw water - it's reckless and more common, but for me it's the nastiness behind the water throwing that is more apparent this year.