IT was not at all how I imagined my first morning in Myanmar. After a week of waiting for my visa in Bangkok, I happened to have slipped into the country the afternoon before water festival celebrations began.

The following morning my jet-lagged slumber was interrupted by the sound of shouting.

“Becky! Becky! Get up! Come Outside! Come Outside!”

It was my housekeeper – her tone suggested some kind of emergency had broken out on the streets of Yangon. At the very least, I was expecting an invasion, a deadly plague or perhaps an earthquake.

My eyes could just focus on the hands of my watch, which showed it was 7:30am. Bleary-eyed and disorientated I fell from my bed into the hallway and out into the sunshine, which had no right to be so bright and colourful at that god forsaken hour. Images of fires, hurricanes and police raids flashed into my head. I can’t say I was ready for anything, but I was at least trying to prepare myself for the calamity that surely awaited me.

With a swiftness, which, I later found out, came from much practice, my housekeeper threw a bucket of water over my head.

I realised then that, no, I was not ready for anything. I was now standing on my door-step, soaked from head to toe, while a gathering army of neighbours had come over to point and giggle at the dripping foreigner in her pyjamas.

There have been few occasions in my life when my entire sense of the rights and wrongs of social etiquette have been turned upside down so completely. There have been even fewer where I have felt not only incapable of formulating sentences, but unable to release any kind of verbal communication. As I stood there dripping, even screaming seemed beyond me.

In the UK, when a stranger throws a bucket of water over a random person in the street it tends to be seen as an aggressive act, almost certainly weird and most definitely rude. There is a rather delicate set of social dos and don’ts that I have been taught in my twenty six years of life – one of those is to not throw buckets of water over people.

I realised immediately I should expect anything and everything in the five days of madness that were about to unfold.

My first week in Myanmar – and my first experience of Thingyan – was incredible and unpredictable; a release of energy, with plenty of dancing and merry-making.

The festival marks the Buddhist New Year and the aim is to cleanse the difficulties and sins of the past 12 months. But to the uninitiated it appears a national effort to flood the streets, people, cars, animals – almost anything except monks, nuns and pregnant women – with copious amounts of water.

It’s also the one time in the year when people can let their hair down.
Stages or pandals are set up along the roads close to a water source. Organisations and collectives then sell tickets for their stage. Pandals have advantages. For one, they offer you a brief reprieve from the normally non-stop water attacks (I say most – pandal-going is not without its hazards). Importantly though a ticket to a pandal gives you a platform about 20 metres above the road from where you can torture and harass passers-by with streams of water.

The pandals provide each person with about three or four hose pipes and if you’re really lucky, a fully functioning fire hose, for “purifying” those who come within 10 metres of your vantage point. (Alternatively, they can be used to soak members of your own pandal.)

On the road below, processions of trucks run the pandal gauntlet, laden with people ready to face the deluge of water. The struggle between those on the pandal and the road can at times verge on the masochistic. Why is it so fun to watch people writhe beneath the power of 20 simultaneous streams of water, most of which are directed at their head? And why is it such a thrill to be on the trucks or road beneath the pandal fighting to walk, sometimes even to stand, against the onslaught of water?

Although many of the pandals are on Inya Road and University Avenue, children with ice cubed water and buckets are everywhere – you soon learn that it’s virtually impossible to leave your house without getting soaked.

Amongst the havoc, there is coordination, such as the daily 7:30am wake-up call and the precise closing time of the pandals, which is stretched only on the final day. This is in stark contrast to the streets of Yangon, where music blasts, people dance and, most importantly, water flows.

Our housekeeper, having forgiven my less-than-enthusiastic response when she cleansed me of my sins from the past year, adopted me and my flatmate for the duration of the festivities.

Celebrating Thingyan was a full-time job that required the stamina to withstand being out in 40C heat, while being bombarded with water for about eight hours.
The secret to sustaining the party spirit on board our truck seemed to be copious amounts of whisky and fried insects.

A year has now gone by and I’m rather looking forward to the early morning wake-up call from my housekeeper on April 13. Looking back over a year of unpredictable events in the country I realise that preparing for the unexpected was probably an excellent introduction to Myanmar after all.