Water Festival.
Notes about the Water Festival
The big races ended in Phnom Penh on Sunday, but racing then continued in the provinces as the boats returned home and their hometown crews raced each other for local bragging rights.
I was wondering how the 400-odd boats actually got to Phnom Penh. Some of them could travel the streams and rivers to get to the capital, but other areas of the country are fairly well removed from any big streams connecting with the four major rivers. And the boats are too big to be transported by anything other than a railroad car--only the railroads have never been rebuilt here after all the warring. I got a partial answer to the transportation question when--as we traveled to a small Vietnamese village along the Mekong River--we passed a boat racing crew, about 30 young men, walking their boat home, rolling it on specially built sets of bicycle wheels which they placed every twenty feet under the 60-70 foot boat.
Most of the boats are stored in local Buddhist monasteries (wats) because those are the only places with enough flat land and space to store a very long boat!
The population of Phnom Penh almost doubled during this year's water festival as people poured into the capital from the provinces. In a simple, under-developed agricultural country like Cambodia, national boat races are a big occasion, and hundreds of thousands of people leave the villages for the big city to cheer for their local team. It is the opposite of the Khmer New Year, the other big annual festival, when nothing is happening in Phnom Penh, and all the people here go back to their home villages in the provinces.
Many government officials own their own boats which are raced in the Water Festival. It's a way of demonstrating their closeness to the people.
The crowds on the streets the afternoons and nights of the three-day festival have to be seen to be believed. And it is pure chaos with motordupes going every-which direction through the throngs along with occasional cars and trucks jammed with people in the back. It is amazing more people aren't killed during the festival. There are many police and soldiers standing in the middle of the streets full of people, but they can't do anything and have no plan for doing anything. There is no crowd or traffic control. It is a perfect setting for an accidental riot caused by a traffic accident or fight. Several years ago 10-15 people were electrocuted as the crowds wore away the insulation of ordinary electric wires laid across the street by vendors, and then as the first people were electrocuted others piled into them and fell on top of them.
The crowds can be basically unruly, too. Our young women lay missioners, in the midst of the crowds down at the waterfront, complained that they were repeatedly jostled and touched and groped. Foreign women often complain of that in a culture where white skin women, especially with light-colored hair, are a real curiosity. Usually people just want to touch their arms in a non-threatening way, but in a huge crowd like that the dynamics change dramatically.
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