Week 5: Thailand's Phi Ta Khon Festival

Week 5: Thailand

We arrived in Bangkok's main tourist neighborhood last Thursday night at 11pm, just looking for a convenient spot to spend the night before boarding a bus to the mysterious Ghost Festival. We stepped out of the taxi, and after one glance around, we almost hopped back in. Gone were the seas of Muslim head scarves and Indonesian faces. In their place blasted 24-hour techno music stands, shirtless and bikini-clad tourists, a hundred varieties of alcohol, and shady Thai men advertising "ping pong shows." We fled to a cheap hotel much further from the rave, and cowered in our room fearing that we would never again find the pleasant, tourist-free chaos of Indonesia.

Before we fled Bangkok, we sampled the haute cuisine of cockroaches, grasshoppers, and grubs.

The next morning we escaped the tourist terror of Bangkok on an 8-hour bus ride to Dan Sai, a rural village in northern Thailand that hosts the yearly Phi Ta Khon Ghost Festival. Neither our guide book nor Emmy's Fulbright friends could explain this strange celebration, and we soon found out why. Phi Ta Khon ("pee tah cone") was the strangest possible mixture of Buddhist prayer, Halloween, teenage angst, and moonshine that tasted like it would make you go blind. We awoke at 4am on the first day to catch Part 1, the opening prayer ceremony. We waited in the rain for an hour and then fought with our eyelids during the candlelit prayer. Dawn finally broke as the monks paraded down to scour the river for a white stone that embodied a holy spirit. The otherworldly scene of orange robes slogging through the morning mud was broken only by tourists jamming their two-foot lenses into the monks' faces and flashing snapshots for their blogs.

Novice monks led the parade down to the river, but were not allowed to jump in and look for the holy white rock.

In Phi Ta Khon: Part 2, the monks retired and the villagers brought out the costumes. Completely incongruous with the monks before them, these rural villagers dressed as large phallic monsters, savage "jungle natives," and various carnival sideshows. For the rest of the first day, traditional music groups accompanied these increasingly intoxicated monsters, wandering aimlessly all over Dan Sai. The maniacal monster outfits and gruesome "penis-swords" intimidated us until we realized that behind the snarling wooden masks were fairly shy 14-year-old boys. When 10pm rolled around, these kids took off their costumes and danced to live Thai pop music, transforming the main street into a big block party. We jumped in to boogie down with them, deciding that perhaps Phi Ta Khon was just a giant puberty
release valve.

Amos gets in the monster costume and terrorizes a local boy, to the great excitement of the wannabe photojournalists.

Apparently blackface is not offensive in Thailand. Neither is making fun of your own ancestors.

This shy 14-year-old was obviously quite frightened by Emmy.

The second day of Phi Ta Khon left us more confused than the first. Religious leaders came from the province capital to lead a long parade. Right behind them marched Mr. and Mrs. Phi Ta Khon, 12-foot tall monsters with enlarged sex organs. The monsters were somewhat tipsy, and actually fell over multiple times in their haste to pursue an errant female in the crowd. The "beauty pageant" came third, about 100 displeased-looking girls each wearing 20 pounds of traditional jewelry. Finally, hundreds of Phi Ta Khon monsters flooded the streets, brandishing their inappropriate weapons, posing for photos, and in general displaying bad-boy attitudes. We latched on to a traditional music group and danced the traditional Thai twist with the village elders, who pulled us tirelessly back into the party after we collapsed, drowning in our own sweat. We closed out the festival by joining the monks to watch reckless villagers explode bamboo rockets from a rickety bamboo tower. If you have any bright ideas about what the heck is going on with Phi Ta Khon, please let us know.

The towering, drunken giants clobber through the crowds, stumbling and falling in search of pretty girls.

The village elders, who out-partied us.

After Amos joined the traditional music group, he briefly considered a professional gonging career.

The beauty queens were overjoyed about their role in the parade.

This was supposed to be the end of our experience in Thailand. Did Amos fall into another sewer? Why didn't we immediately flee across the border into Laos, Thailand's less touristy neighbor? We arrived in Nan Khay, the Thai border town, and were captivated by our first
glance at the Mekong River, which we will be following through Laos for the next two weeks. The sneaky guesthouse receptionist convinced us to spend just one day in Nan Khay, to see the Sala Kaeow Ku cement sculpture garden. We biked to Sala Kaeow Ku, fully aware that a "cement sculpture garden" could be a fancy name for a parking lot. We were blown away.

Our first glimpse of the Mekong River.

A quarter mile from the garden, we could already see gargantuan grey figures rising high above the trees. When we got up close, we saw 100-foot-tall cement cobras, Buddhas, Buddhas carrying cobras, and cobras carrying Buddhas. Built in the mid-20th century by a self-taught Laotian architect, the gardens also featured statues of American generals and Africans holding AK-47s. But the most flabbergasting part was the cement visitor center that looked like a mosque/steamboat hybrid. The architect showed his unique religious beliefs by covering the first and second floors with mixed Buddhist and Hindu imagery, and paraded his megalomania on the third floor by preserving his last wheelchair, bathtub, hospital bed, and hundreds of his own portraits. In the locked back room, surrounded by a shrine of flowers, golden Buddhas, and neon disco lights, visitors were treated to the sight of his brown, decaying corpse. Definitely the gnarliest display of artwork in Southeast Asia thus far.

The sculpture garden faintly resembled an amusement park, since the statues were as tall as roller coasters.

Even though the seven-headed snake was 100 feet tall, you could still make out the elaborate detail carved into all seven Emmy-sized tongues.

The architect apparently taught himself to build five-story wire frames, fill them with bricks, cover the bricks with cement, and carve the cement.

Okay, put your last wheelchair on display in a shrine that you built for yourself. But your last three wheelchairs? Come on.

The strangest room in all of Thailand. The sarcophagus might have looked Egyptian, except for the flashing neon disco lights around the body. Not too surprising if you remember that he lived through the psychedelic 1970s.

That's it for Thailand, but get ready for Week 6 in Laos, a sleepy country that we secretly carpet-bombed for nine years of the Vietnam War, and still has only one paved highway.

A taste of what's to come! Can you guess which country colonized Laos?