Pattaya Celebrates Successful Songkran Festival, First With Water in Four Years

Pattaya —

Pattaya beautifully wrapped up its first full-on Songkran festival in four years yesterday. The event ended successfully with Wan Lai, or the Big Day, where Beach Road was partially turned into a walking street and was crammed with thousands of Songkran revelers marching through the street, helping pump money into the city.

The recent Songkran festival was the first all-out Songkran featuring the famous water fights after four years of the Covid-19 outbreak and restrictions around events and festivals in Thailand.

The festival in Pattaya literally lasted for a week as it included both normal Songkran running from April 13th-18th and Wan Lai on April 19th which just wrapped up yesterday.

Beach Road was closed and transformed into a pedestrian street for several kilometers from Central Klang to Walking Street to allow people to engage in water-playing activities and enjoy multiple concert and DJ stages set up along the road, along with several hundred vendors of various goods and services.

Concerts were held to energize the atmosphere, and the city’s fire trucks even joined in the festivities by spraying water on people as part of the authorities’ involvement. Hundreds of pickup trucks carrying children and adults, armed with water guns, also drove through the streets, creating heavy congestion, but it was all part of the fun.

Despite the lively atmosphere, one of the successes of the event was that there were no major accidents in the city. According to the authorities, Pattaya only recorded one traffic accident that resulted in a fatality. This was thanks to the authorities’ effective measures that kept the festivity organized and safe throughout the course of the long event. There were some reports of pickpocketing, but no major crimes.

Rolling Loud Thailand, the world’s largest touring hip-hop festival, also had a successful event in Pattaya during Songkran.