Happy Buddhist New Year 1377 from Ngwe Saung Beach

April is the hottest time of the year in Myanmar, which means it’s the perfect time for the biggest holiday of the year: Thingyan Water Festival, during which the entire country closes down for10 days. Despite the length of the break, the festival itself is only four days long (depending on the year), followed by Buddhist New Year’s Day, which this year fell on April 17.

During my first couple of years in Myanmar, I submitted to the chaos of Thingyan in Yangon, where a significant portion of the populace takes to the streets to toss water on each other using water pistols, buckets, and even garden hoses powered by portable generators. Huge wooden stages are set up from which music is blared and revelers soak the steady stream of passersby who line up for the express purpose of getting doused by the turbo-charged hoses. If you’re in the city, there’s no escape unless you stay locked up in your house: If you show your face outside, you (and everything you are carrying) will get drenched.

Ostensibly, the watering is meant to symbolize the washing away of the misdeeds of the past year; mythically, Thingyan is the time during which Thagyamin, the King of the Celestials, descends to earth and inscribes everyone’s name in one of two books: the golden one for the nice, and the dog-skinned one for the naughty. In reality the holiday inspires plenty of sketchy behavior of its own, most notably four consecutive days of massive alcohol consumption and its attendant idiocy. But not everyone partakes in the water splashing. Many Buddhists use the long holiday as an excuse to spend time meditating in a monastery or nunnery. Others stay home with their families making Thingyan snacks and catching up on their backlog of books and DVDs.

However people choose to spend the water festival, New Year’s Day (April 17) is one of Myanmar’s quietest days. Buddhists flock to pagodas to make offerings, and they also visit elders, parents, and teachers to give thanks.

For me, the attraction of being drowned in water by inebriated Burmese teenagers wore off a few years ago, and now I use the annual holiday as an excuse to get as far away from Yangon as possible. Sometimes this means fleeing the country altogether, but more often it means heading to other parts of Myanmar where Thingyan is generally celebrated in a more low-key, gentler fashion than in Yangon.

This year we headed for Ngwe Saung Beach, located on the Bay of Bengal about 150 miles west of Yangon.

The view from our room.

Our days consisted of morning bike rides, mid-morning swims in the ocean, lunch, afternoon siestas, late afternoon swims in the ocean, dinner, nocturnal beach walks, beer and wine on the patio of our room, and then sleep. Repeat for five days. Our only really excursion was hiring a local boat to take us out to some islands off the coast for swimming and snorkeling.

A few photos from the boat trip: