Suk-San Wan Songkran

I'll never forget the day I got in to a shoot-out in Thailand.

I awoke in a sticky stupor that April morning, beads of sweat sledding down my forehead before my eyes were open. 13 days in to the hottest month of the year and numerous nights sans air conditioning had begun to take their toll...the heat was, definitively, driving me insane. Rolling over, I slid my hand along the wooden floor and reached for the weapon I had stashed beneath my bed the day prior...A water gun.

Songkran, the annual festival to ring in the Thai New Year, is celebrated with massive water fights to (both literally and metaphorically) wash away the bad and purify ones slate for the upcoming year. Blessed by good timing, I had managed to place myself in the epicenter of the madness this year--Chiang Mai, a city in the north, is infamous for its Songkran induced chaos.

A dangerous mix of groggy and excited, I took to the sun-stained streets with my squirt gun in hand and was quickly soaked by the euphoria around me; a year of anticipation was finally emancipated in the form of brim-filled buckets and bright colored squirt guns. Packed pickup trucks and brave tuk-tuk drivers made their way through hordes of people as torrents of water, flying through the air, landed on the street, on faces, on clothes--everything in sight was drenched.

My heat-induced lethargy finally subsided, and I found myself soaked and seeking shelter. I turned down an alley just in time to catch a group of cackling girls filling their squirt guns in a tub of melted ice. Chills covered my skin before the water even hit my body--their cold hands reaching for my face, I felt the cold and sticky talc powder (applied for good luck) smear across my cheeks.

Thousands of miles from home, it was as if these girls were washing away the differences among us -- all language, ethnic, and cultural barriers fell away in those brief moments. Each of us was lost in laughter, somehow fatefully united on this specific day and time. And for me, this is what travel is all about: losing ourselves in a foreign land--being totally immersed in the unknown--yet still having beautiful moments of clarity about our selves, our lives, and our world. Travel allows us to experience firsthand that we are, despite all evidence to the contrary, inextricably linked merely through the experience of being alive.

I heard the voice of one of the girls chasing me as I began to run away.

"Suk-San Wan Songkran!"

Happy Songkran, indeed.