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The Best Party in Thailand
Part Two

We found the best party in Thailand in a small town in the northeast called Yasothon. For most of the year, it is a sleepy town with very little to offer visitors. But every year, for a single weekend in May, the city explodes into life for Bun Bang Fai - the rocket festival. Bun Bang Fai is celebrated in other places in Thailand as well, but Yasothon is well-known to have the most exuberant celebration. This fact is noted in guidebooks and on websites, but still not too many tourists make it there because it is so bloody out of the way.

Bangkok's central train station

The (much smaller) station at Surat Thani

To get there from Ko Samui (in the south), we took taxis, buses, boats, and two night trains in a row. When we arrived in Yasothon, we were unceremoniously dumped at the side of the road in a pouring rainstorm. Due to the paucity of hotel information available (on the internet and in our guidebooks), we had left hotel arrangements until our arrival. We peered down the street from under a small overhang, but no hotels were evident. The only nearby business open at 8:30am in the morning was a jewelry shop. Luckily for us, the owner not only spoke some English, but out of the kindness of her heart, she arranged for her son to give us a ride to the J.P. Emerald, the only remotely fancy hotel in town.

The front desk at the Emerald were happy to check us in for the night, but informed us that they were completely booked for the rest of the holiday weekend. We enjoyed the hotel's buffet breakfast, where we met Willy, a murky-tongued Englishman who was in town to make a documentary on the festival. In talking to him, though, we discovered he wasn't the most prepared documentarian - he had come alone, with no on-screen host. To make up for this, he had been desperately scrabbling around for someone and settled on a Thai woman who spoke a little English who could provide background on the festival. We wished him luck and went to our room for a nap.

It was late afternoon when we finally ventured out for a walk. We found that the celebration was already gearing up on the main street in town. For about a mile, the road was lined on both sides with stages, each with an enormous bank of speakers that was blasting music. On stage, groups of people dressed in intentionally silly clothes danced without inhibition. It was a truly amazing sight: people of all ages, from small children to old ladies who would usually scowl at you, were letting down their hair and flailing about happily.



Every stage had some kind of theme. Frequently, it was as simple as everyone wearing matching loud Hawaiian shirts or traffic-cone orange outfits. Other stages offered more elaborate costumes: drag queens, Indian saris, rock star getup, etc. Another common sight was people with some kind of white powder smeared on their cheeks. We were never able to figure out just what it was (flour? dirt? chalk?) or what it was for (humility? fertility? humor?).

Walking down the street was quite an interesting experience. Every stage was blasting their own music at ear-splitting levels, often right across the street from each other. As we strolled by a stage, the people on it would invariably wave at us as if we were famous. Sometimes, they would offer us some of their beer or try to persuade us (through gestures) to join them on stage. We gave in to one group, who then excitedly posed for pictures with us.



Beer flowed freely. It wasn't unusual for someone to ask for a bit of our beer (which they would pour into a cup) or offer us some of theirs. One of the main sponsors was Lion Beer, a not-too-bad local brew whose stalls were numerous along the street. One particularly humorous stall featured a guy on a megaphone exhorting people to buy the beer... people who were only a couple of feet away from him.

I should mention that in this part of Thailand, English speakers are rare. Generally, only hotel employees spoke English, and that was hesitant at best. Whereas in most of Thailand, signs are bi-lingual, here everything was only in the indecipherable squiggle of Thai. It was here more than anywhere else on our trip that we learned how it is possible to get along quite well with gestures and facial expressions. Of course, we didn't have any deep philosophical conversations without the use of language, but we got along fine.






Just off the main road, a carnival had been set up. We paid the 25-cent admission fee, and wandered around inside. We tried our hands at a shooting gallery, and after a couple tries, both won a small stuffed animal for each other. The food vendors offered the usual selection of meat-on-a-stick (of various kinds) and dried squid. There was also a beauty pageant underway, but the audience area was muddy and packed full of people, so we returned to the main road.



As darkness fell, the party got more raucous and the dancing continued. Some stages commanded a large audience, while others seemed content to just enjoy their own dancing. We enjoyed ourselves just being immersed in the festive atmosphere and being treated like celebrities.



There was one shocking incident. We had been drawn into a crowd of people dancing below one of the stages and shook our booties a bit before withdrawing into the audience. As I stood there nursing a beer, a woman came up to us and asked for a sip. By now, I didn't find it odd and handed over my can. To my surprise, she put the can to her two-year-old child's lips and gave him a few gulps. I couldn't believe my eyes and felt compelled to record it because it was so weird. So, thinking to myself, "I'm going to go to hell for this," I handed the can back to her for a second "feeding" while Steve took a picture. The poor kid was showing the effects, and looked quite unsteady.



Steve and I tired out way before the Yasothonians, and hit the sack while the party thumped into the night. Scheduled for the next day was the big parade. As we emerged from the hotel in the morning, we were surprised to see all the stages still in action! We never determined if they had gone to bed and woken up before us, or if it had been an all-night party.

We lugged our backpacks across town to a much cheaper and more basic hotel which had rooms available, then wandered the streets in anticipation of the parade. When it came, it was exciting at first, with big elaborate floats carrying rockets, and large contingents of dancers.


A float

The first group came to where we were watching and stopped to perform. It consisted of about thirty women dressed in traditional costume, followed by about as many men playing drums. They performed a slow, precise dance to the drum music before moving along the parade route. To our surprise, the next group was very similar except instead of women, it was a group of drag queens! Yasothon is not at all a hip, urban cultural center, so it was unexpected to see a large number of drag queens in the parade (maybe eighty overall) performing in front of small-town families who received them enthusiastically.

The women

The drag queens







After a while, however, we realized that all the dancing groups in the parade performed the same slow dance to the same slow music. It became monotonous after a while, so we followed the parade to a temple and watched some of the same acts perform again. We spent the rest of the day taking advantage of the Cheapest Internet Ever (about 40 cents an hour) and anticipating the next day's event: the rocket launching.



The morning dawned clear and hot, and we headed with the rest of the town to a big park on the edge of the city to watch the climax of the festival. Inside a demarcated "Denger Zone" were five launch structures: two big and three medium-sized. The rockets they fired from these were enormous, home-made weapons of destruction.



Erase any mental picture you may have of Estes rockets from your youth. The "medium-sized" rockets were ten feet long, with about four feet of gunpowder stuffed inside a blue PVC pipe attached to a bamboo log. The big ones were at least thirty feet long. The propellant section was about a foot in diameter and twelve feet long. They were launched from wooden scaffolding which dwarfed the ten or so men it took to secure the rocket in place and attach the ignition wiring.




The first big rocket we saw exploded on the launchpad in a spectacular fiery eruption, followed by a dense, opaque cloud of smoke that obscured the entire launch area. Intrigued, we moved inside the "Denger Zone" to get a closer view. Sadly, the rest of the rockets that day managed to leave the launchpad, although a few exploded in mid-air.



Although we were cheering for more unplanned explosions, for the rocket makers a lot of pride was resting on the performance of their rockets. Those whose rockets failed in some way were thrown in the mud. Those who engineered a straight, high flight were jubilant, especially as new records in height and airtime were announced. As the day wore on, muddy people began appearing everywhere. Generally, the muddier the person, the drunker they were. Whole groups of friends sat wallowing in shady patches of mud.

We spent a lovely day, sitting on a grassy hill and watching rockets launch. Steve bought a big silver umbrella under which we sheltered from the brutal sun. We enjoyed noodles from a nearby vendor for lunch.


Even the monks enjoy Bun Bang Fai

By three-thirty, we were worn out and headed back to our hotel as the locals, some of who we suspected had been awake and drinking for two days straight, continued their revelry. Steve and I both agreed that our time in Yasothon was the most fun three days of our whole trip.

NEXT...Malaysia