Well, what has been happening here? After our last update Luke and I headed into town for the festival. It was pretty amazing, there was a huge stage show with Thai dancers and a performance of the legend behind the Naga fireballs. There were food stalls galore, but silly us, we’d eaten before we went so we were too full to try any of the local food. We didn’t stay too long, the stage show was interesting but was continuously interrupted by long stretches of commentary that were (of course) in Thai so we quickly got tired of standing there pretending not to be bored! It worked out well for us though because when we got back to the Mutmee guesthouse, the owner, Julian, was setting up a showing of the Mekhong Full Moon Party at his house so we were able to watch the film that got the fireballs all the attention they have these days. It was a really interesting movie, and although it didn’t give an explanation for the phenomenon it went into quite a few of the different theories behind it.
The day of the Naga fireball festival was incredible! From start to finish it was an amazing day! Julian had organised transport for everyone at the guesthouse and at 1pm we all piled into the back of two songleaws and made the one hour trip to the village of Phonphisai. The amount of traffic on the roads was incredible. Luke and I were sitting in the front with the driver and we had a great time watching the reactions of all the thais overtaking us in their cars! Barely a car went by without at least a smile or a wave but most often there was cheering and shouting or laughing and pointing. What a sight we must have been.. two bus loads of farang! The cars that went by were packed to the brim, it seems EVERYONE wants to see the fireballs! In the back of one ute I counted 12 adults and four children!!
The road on the way to the village was absolutely breathtaking! Along the sides of the road were a few houses but mainly it was jungle area, about fifteen minutes into the drive I started noticing trees that had been shaped into animals. They were hiding within the normal trees of the jungle so you couldn’t always see them clearly but they were just fantastic! Now you have to understand I am not talking about the little shrub animals you see in Australia, these were actual trees transformed into animals.. some were almost TWO STORIES high! For miles and miles and miles there were elephants as tall as four men, horses with actual riders holding onto reigns, circles of children dancing and holding hands – each child in a different position, dogs, cats, birds, even dinosaurs!!! It was just incredible to see and sometimes you would go a kilometre or so without seeing anything and then out of nowhere you would see another giant tyranosaurus rex or a elephant on his hind legs.. spectacular!!
We arrived at Phonphisai at about 2pm, and even though the fire balls don’t appear until well after dark there were already thousands upon thousands of people. We walked down to the river and all along the river bank, as far as the eye could see, were hundreds of tents and thousands of bamboo mats, all filled with (or covered with) people. Away from the river, every available patch of ground, through the streets and along the footpaths were food and drink stalls or people sitting on the ground selling bamboo mats or fans or hats. The streets were swarming with people! There were news vans and jumping castles and ferris wheels and dodgem cars and merry go rounds and and loud speakers going off all over the place, there were men selling balloons as big as children or carrying stalks as tall as three people covered with fairyfloss.. it was mayhem!!
Luke and I wandered around for an hour or so getting our bearings and taking in the atmosphere of the place and we eventually found ourselves a shady place in the middle of the main market where we sat down and after much sign language and pointing managed to order lunch and two cokes (the coke part was easy – coke, it seems, is universal). We ate our lunch and then went in search of our own little piece of land by the river, we bought two bamboo mats to sit on and two bamboo fans to fan ourselves with and then fought our way through the crowd. Surprisingly we managed to find ourselves a spectacular spot only two metres from the waters edge. By now there were still three hours until sunset so we got comfortable and watched the crowds swell. The amazing thing about the festival was the happiness of the crowd, there were so many people, some of whom had been sitting in the hot sun since it rose just waiting for night fall, there were people drinking huge amounts of alcohol but we didnt see one fight or disagreement. Every single person I saw was smiling or laughing, it was magical!
By sunset there were hundreds of thousands of people there to see the fireballs (some have even said there were over a MILLION people who showed up!) We were squished into a sea of Thais, there was only one other farang in sight (a man who was sitting on – of all things – a banana lounge!).
On one side we had a group of thai men in their thirties who not only had a huge feast set out on the mat but had icebuckets full of beer and (many) large bottles of whisky, they befriended Luke and insisted on trying to get us drunk. We didnt want to offend so after the third offer of a drink we accepted and then no matter how much we protested they kept filling up our glass the second it touched either of our lips, they also gave us a cigarette anytime one of them decided to have one. One guy in particular was very friendly – although he couldnt speak english except to tell us his name was bruce (this took about four minutes to establish) and that he likes soccer and goes for Manchester United, as he got drunker he got chattier and by the end of the night he was enlisting the help of strangers in the crowd to act as translaters!! (at one point he insisted that he could introduce luke to some ‘beautiful thai ladies’, luke respectfully declined and not long after that the man started swaying dangerously and fell asleep.
On the opposite side of the boys was a family of locals (by family I mean Great Grandparents, Grandparents, Parents and Children) who had a bucket of iced water and because we had lent them one of our fans, wanted to share it with us all night. Part of this family was a young woman with a four month old baby boy named flame. Thankfully she could speak english (thankfully because the eldest woman refused to accept that I couldnt understand and babbled at me at a hundred miles an hour every time I made eye contact!)
There were a group of young thai girls who had a crush on Luke and were keen to practise their english with him, except when he introduced us they got confused and though I was luke and he was Nikki so they kept calling him Nikki each time they spoke with him which kind of ruined the seduction…
There was a young thai couple who were celebrating being lost in a crowd by making out. We gave them one of our bamboo mats so they didnt have to sit on the wet ground (one of ours was big enough to fit both of us) and they were so grateful that they too kept offering us whisky.
With all that whisky I guess it was lucky that we were able to walk back to the bus when the time came!!
Amidst the whiskey sharing and the translating and the explaining to people we didnt speak thai we watched fireworks from both the Thai side of the river and the Laos side (from both professional firework companies and those that were being let off in the crowd) we cheered at nothing, just for the fun of it, we stood up a hundred times when someone else cheered for the fun of it and everyone thought something was happening – though nothing was, and we watched beautiful boats float down the river covered with candles and fairy lights.
We had agreed to meet back at the bus at 10pm and when it was time to go back to the meeting place we still hadn’t seen a single fireball! Thats right not a single one! By this time a lot of people had given up (especially those with kids) and the crowd was starting to thin but the strangest thing was that no-one was mad, noone was annoyed that they had waited all day – and you have to remember that some people had travelled hundreds or even thousands of kilometres especially for the fire balls – noone was impatient with the crowds or anything like that.
The hour trip back to Nong Khai took three hours (one and a half of which was spent on one 50m stretch of road) but even that was great fun.. all the farang (still the subject of much amusement) jumped out of the back of the songleaw and stood by the side of the road smoking and chatting or running to nearby stores to buy drinks or icecream taking a few steps each time the bus started inching down the road so that we were within jumping distance in case it decided to go anywhere. When we finally did start rolling Luke and I were already on the bus but there was a mad rush as everyone else jumped into the back of the moving bus! Luckily we didnt leave anyone behind! The driver certainly wasn’t checking!
The next day we checked out of Mutmee Guesthouse and crossed the border into Laos. (we caught a tuk tuk to the bus station, a bus to the thai border, another bus across the Mekhong to the laos border and then the dodgiest taxi in the world – an old datsun – to a hotel that we didnt ask to be taken to – but thats another story)… We didnt even get fined for overstaying our visa!
Laos is beautiful. It is strange that two countries so close together can be so similar and so different at the same time. Laos is calmer somehow, less tacky, more genuine. I am looking forward to spending the next month getting to know the place!
Ok enough Nikki babble. we are off to explore!
