Festivities

Monday night was Loy Kathong, a fantastic festival in Thailand that signifies the repentance of a nation. The streets of Pattaya started to fill up on Friday and it wasn’t long that it appeared the whole of Bangkok had come on vacation for the weekend. Traffic was atrocious, forcing us all to motorcycles, and the sheer mass of humanity that filled the city was astounding. Pattaya is a relatively small city, with a labyrinth of little streets (called sois). As you head down toward the water and into the downtown area of the city near the beach these streets are literally bar after bar, with nothing in between, and girls lined up selling themselves to the night. There are thousands of girls in this small city. Loy Kathong marks the beginning of the tourist surge for Pattaya. As the Christmas season approaches the city nearly doubles in capacity and sex tourism becomes a very lucrative business for these girls. Girls who come from rural villages in the North East, where people live off of 3 dollars a day if they are lucky and have little hope of ever ending the cycle of poverty, have little other opportunity handed. These girls are often no older than 16 or 17 when they first come to the city. Impressionable young minds hoping to make something of them self and help to support their families become trapped in a web of exploitation and shame. Even in the crazy world of clashing cultures and sex tourism that Pattaya is, the night of the festival gave a real sense of deeply ingrained Thai traditions and respect for the culture.

The Loy Kathong festival is an amazing spectacle of traditional Thai dress and floating banana boats. Nearly everyone in the city sits down the day of the festival and makes small floating boats out of banana tree trunks and leaves, adorned with orchids and other flowers and a candle. As darkness falls there is an exodus of the city to the beach where thousands of people light their candles and launch their symbols of repentance into the sea. Many of the girls and even some men wear in the traditional Thai dress which is a colorful sparkling spectacle! Absolutely Beautiful. Even along Walking Street, Pattaya’s main drag of bars the city seemed to sparkle and take on a new identity for the night.

Look at my beautiful banana boat! ;)