Phi Ta Khon, Loei

I have been photographing Thai festivals for a very long time, and even longer than that I have been attending them. There aren’t many left who were here in the seventies, and the eighties were not especially forward facing for Thailand so that puts me as one of the few “Westerners” to have seen the long tail effects of modernisation here. Although I spent a lot of the past decade in Thailand, much of it was Chiang Mai, Samui or Bangkok. Only in the past three years did I come “home” to Isaan, where I had hoped to find the remnants of a country I once knew. In conversation with Philip Blenkinsop I remarked how so little has changed despite so much change, a sentiment he disagreed with. Yet my grandmother lives in the same house, our family fish the same pond and harvest the same fields. My house is the same as it was thirty years ago, just a little quieter without my Dad, and without Peter next door, and Bob up the street. All having long passed, their houses sold, whitewashed walls peeling and Blue Ridge Mountain replaced with barking dogs. I even miss Bert and his love of John Denver, as much as one can miss an American. So whilst I never saw ‘Nam, I saw what it did. In ways I guess Philip is right, if you measure change by mobile phones and car models. But people? They are the same as ever.

What I hadn’t accounted for was how much modern amenities would exaggerate peoples least desirable traits. Many live lives on a five-inch screen, where face is measured in likes, not respect. I feel as if I am about to bump into Alice at any moment, perhaps she knows a way out, I can’t bear the Cheshire’s grin much longer. And so we land on festivals. Songkran is not what it once was and Loy Krathong is following suit. But the rural ones no one knows like Bum Fai Naga & Phi Ta Khon? I thought they would last untouched, surely. Yet here I am, a day after Loei’s Ghost Festival, with sunburned hands, my motorbike ticking over 19K and unsure how a once deeply cultural parade has become a magnet for Dek Wen and Wirun (perhaps best translated to Punk, the kind Clint Eastwood would deem very unlucky, not Sid and the gang). Cutting through the mountain passes nose to tail, no shoes, much less helmets, and with no thought to any other using the road. “All hat, no cattle” Bert or Bob might have said. Now, I’m not some Grandpa, I used to be GM of a motorbike shop. I love me a Tiger and would buy a CB650 if every road wasn’t a mirror of the dark side of the moon, unlit and cratered. The ones on real bikes? They weren’t the problem.

I’m never in a good mood with these things, a long ride, stuck in traffic. Sometimes too hot and tripping from exhaust fumes and other times soaked to the bone when the clouds decide to dump their contents over a 20 minute span. Makes me want to go back to shooting Temples. In fact, I saw a great one on the way back and I am sure I would have had a far better day with the monks. Perhaps that’s just where I am in life. Despite that, I knew deep in my bones that if I didn’t shoot the festival, it would nag at me. Like an ingrown nail or some other mild discomfort. Anyway, that gets forgotten once my camera is in my hands. These festivals are mostly the same now, repetitive music playing far too loud, part excuse for a party (that hasn’t changed), part excuse to sell something. I would be lying if I said Thai people don’t love an excuse for a party, but I would also be lying if I said they aren’t deeply spiritual. It seems that the phallic imagery (clearly fertility related) and ghostly masks have seeped into tradition, but now live as a cultural habit, with any factual information long lost. It’s a little bit funny, little bit scary and like most things here, questions aren’t asked. Perhaps a Wikipedia Warrior knows, but I was there — and no one knew. In fact, they just found it absurd that I would question the normalcy of a meter long, bright red phallus wielding ghost.