Rocket Festival (Bun Bang Fai)
On Saturday 19 June there was a procession through the village with loud Isaan music blasting through the big speakers installed on pushcarts and traditional dances performed by local girls and women who are housewives and farmers in everyday life, donning thick make-up and colourful dresses for the occasion.
Taking a rest
Dancers
Loudspeaker cart
Comical display
Dancers
Dancers
Drums
Beautiful girls in the procession
Beautiful girls in the procession
Dancers
Blind musician
Preparations for launch And then the big day: rockets everywhere! Small rockets, medium-sized rockets, big rockets and the giant ones for the main competition. Perhaps 15 or 20 of these were started over the course of the day from a special wooden launch pad erected in the rice fields some 300 m away (apparently for safety reasons) from the crowd gathering at the edge of the village. Heavy gambling was going on every time a participant was preparing his projectile for the start: will it fail or will it lift off, and if yes, will it last longer than x seconds? Bookies made their rounds and banknotes were waved in the air .
The grandstand at the village edge
Monk walking through the rice fields
Monk crossing in front of the launch pad
The jury watches the launch A jury of four guys introduced the competitors and told stories and jokes to entertain the crowd during breaks. When I entered the scene, the man at the microphone proclaimed, And today we have a foreign visitor here (he did not say farang or mak sida, but rather used the polite chao tarng chart) and then in English: Hello. Whats your name. Thank you. and I waved back at the jury.
After a successful launch, they would use binoculars to follow the trace of the rocket soaring into the sky (they go quite high , I can tell you ) and determine the official time until it has burned out, I suppose. The longest time I witnessed was an impressive 243 seconds! (Dont know how they could see the rocket for so long, considering the cloud cover on that day, but its remains must have landed far behind the neighbour village.) The overall winner gets a prize of 10,000 baht, a little fortune in that part of the country. However, if the rocket fails upon start, the owner (or construction team) is thrown into the mud of the ricefields (remember, beginning of the rainy season!) under the cheers of the crowd or so I was told by my girlfriend.
The rockets trail in the sky
The jury ready to watch the launch
For my part, I got stuck deep in the mud when trying to take a photo. Fortunately I wasnt wearing anything expensive, or real shoes, for that matter, but only shorts and traditional flip-flops (Satellite brand, purchased one day earlier for 39 baht). So it wasnt a major problem, though those slippers were a bit hard to retrieve. The ground can really be treacherous at this time of the year and sometimes you break in through a dry upper layer and end up in the sludge!
Watching the launch |
Rocket Festival in Amphoe Selaphum
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