Buddhist Lent- Yea, apparently they do have one.

Recently I took a trip to the northern boarder of Thailand and Laos in order to partake in a Buddhist festival for the end of Buddhist lent … One which I don’t really know the name of in a village called Tamui. Tamui lies on the Mekong river, right across from Laos. The Village was a nice little place, and the people were extremely nice, and well aware of the tourist destination the village had become. The history of the festival was that there was a Buddhist myth that living in the Mekong river was a very big snake called the naga. On this day, the end of Buddhist lent, the naga is supposed to be spitting fireballs out of the Mekong river, and supposedly show its form.

The day that we got to the village, we were exhausted from the long ride. The bus ride had been about 7 hours on some of the most under done roads I’ve seen in Thailand. The village was getting ready for the huge influx of people they were going to expect the next day. Since the village was still preparing, as a group we went to a local national park that had paintings on the walls of the mountain that dated back to cave men. I have to say the walk was pretty exhausting and really mad me realize how out of shape I really was.

The next day we woke up to blasts outside of the window of the house that we were staying at. As I went outside, I realized that it was just the village kids throwing loud fireworks in too the air… not the safest of things, but to me it seemed awesome. I then spent the rest of the morning periodically buying large amounts of fireworks and throwing them in to the air, thus fulfilling the pyro of my youth. During the afternoon, I actually was invited by one of the villagers to the banana forest in the back of the village. There I found out that the villagers actually create boats out of the banana trees and send them down the river as a offering to the naga. Once the sun went down, the boats were sent down the river, along with hundreds of candle lit flower bouquets. Sadly though, I never got to see any fireballs launched from the river.