Songkran Chiang Mai 2011

Thai's celebrate the Buddhist New Year with the Songkran festival. Originally, this involved sprinkling a small amount of water on one's elders as a token of respect but these days you're more likely to be confronted with buckets of iced water and a collection of high powered water guns as everyone joins in up to five days of massive water fights. Although it's hard to go out anywhere during the hours of daylight and get to your destination without getting soaked, most of the pictures in this gallery were taken around the moat which surrounds Chiang Mai's Old City and the "victims" knew exactly what to expect! This festival is now becoming world famous with many tourists coming to experience what is often billed as "the world's biggest water fight". Most surprising to me is the number of parents taking very young children into the mayhem on the front of a motorbike.