4. Waters (JW)
San Francisco, USA
Dear Hana,
Ever since high school, I’ve always thought of you as someone who feels invigorated by pushing a big red RESET button in your life, somehow chasing the unknown with both levity and depth. I can’t help but draw parallels between your first and second letters.
From the first:
It makes me wonder if all my years spent in foreign countries, tripping over impossible-to-pronounce words, haven’t been about the same thing. Chasing the edginess.
From the second:
This turned out to be quite misleading, as I discovered when I slid into the tub and was confronted with the now-familiar shock of cold. Once the body was fully submerged though, the discomfort went away, and an absolute stillness came, one that surrounded me completely.
Was the comparison intentional or were you perhaps watching the crests of two different ripples without seeing the stone?
It’s been a while since solo travel has had much appeal to me. I’m glad I took the trip to visit you in Denmark and help one of my closest friends set up his elaborate proposal involving a fruit stand last year, but the spurts of time on my own felt largely hollow. I’m always relieved to return home and slot myself back into a regiment of inputs that feel like they compound. Building up persistent relationships, going to the gym, taking dance classes, and writing all scratch this itch for me. Perhaps I’m just addicted to the grind.
But, by virtue of having friends that like to go on adventures, I’m occasionally carried by a wave of their energy to interesting times and places. One particularly relevant to the aqueous theme was visiting Myanmar in April 2017 with 10 friends. Our trip was intentionally planned to overlap an annual festival called Thingyan. In the local script, this is သင်္ကြန်. Curiously, the people and the language are “Myanmar” rather than “Myanmarese”. Myanmar people, Myanmar language.
Thingyan is in many ways similar to other new years traditions. Music, song, dance, and religious rites all have their place. But what sets it apart is the massive water fight that engulfs all of those things.
Now, I’m sure you remember water fights from childhood in the hot Ottawa summers. You probably had some kind of neon coloured water pistol that you’d watch air bubbles escape from as it refilled with a faint glug-glug-glug from a big plastic bucket. The pistol probably delivered about a teaspoon of water at a time to your target (invariably a boy). If you wanted to amp up your arsenal, you might’ve fetched a fist sized water balloon. Maybe you even hit me with one at some point. Regardless, with this petty arsenal, you would be severely outgunned in Yangon, Myanmar on April 13.
As soon as we stepped outside our hotel, we were staring down the barrels of an infantry line of garden hoses held by shopkeepers and their children. Any passersby would be mercilessly drenched, locals and tourists alike. The only ones spared liquid immersion were monks, pregnant women, and the elderly. Being none of the above, my friends and I were soaked to the bone 30 seconds into our day, and largely maintained that saturation for the following three days.
Our first destination was Kandawgyi Nature Park (ကန်တော်ကြီ) for a music event. Given the religious basis for the festival, you might expect some kind of instrumental music. You might be surprised upon arrival at the park to hear the booming bass of EDM in a giant tent sponsored by Coca Cola. The inside of the tent roof was lined with water sprinklers which kept the concert-goers finely misted like a grocery aisle of fresh produce. To ensure that not one of our hairs was left wanting for some water, strangers would, on occasion, thrust the contents of their water bottles into the air above us. Some less considerate folks would occasionally add the contents of their free Coca Cola bottles to the mix. Thankfully, we had a never-ending shower to cleanse us of the sugary residue.
Determined to contribute to the water festival as more than mere targets, we rented a pickup truck for the afternoon. It had enough space for all eleven of us to stand in the flatbed. Along for the ride with us were our water guns, a few small hand-held buckets, and a giant garbage can filled to the brim with water.
It’s interesting how strange circumstances give rise to economic opportunities. A few minutes into our truck ride, we pulled over to meet a particularly savvy opportunist. Wielding a saw, he was cutting giant ice blocks into toaster-sized chunks. We purchased one such chunk and deposited it into our garbage can, yielding far more stinging ammunition for our water weapons. Quite pleased with our upgraded artillery, we roved around town terrorizing everyone within range. It wasn’t long until we discovered we were still far from the top of the food chain.
The first alpha predator we encountered had a persistent high-ground advantage: the double decker bus. Their higher vantage point offered them both protection from our meagre attempts to throw water from our buckets by hand, and more acceleration time for the water they hucked over the railing of the upper deck onto us. The worst was when we were stopped in traffic next to one such bus; we were subjected to a prolonged onslaught from the bus passengers. Sometimes we weren’t even stuck in traffic, our driver was just enjoying watching us get positively destroyed.
The second superior foe we encountered wielded high powered hoses. If zero was a school drinking fountain and ten was one of those power washers used to remove years of grime from wooden decks, these hoses would dial in around an eight-and-a-half. These were the only tools we encountered that bordered on seriously cruel, with several of us leaving with red marks on our skin from the sheer pressure applied by the hoses.
Despite the red-marked skin and shivering we all endured throughout the day, there was something positively heartwarming about the experience. It’s rare to have a travel experience interacting with so many locals that feels neither transactional nor exploitative. It was refreshing to provide the opportunity for locals to so completely dominate tourists.
I wonder where else in the world I can experience something similar. Perhaps I’ll visit Buñol, Spain one August just in case you send me a letter entitled “Tomatoes”.
Your gratefully dry friend,
Jamie
