The official festival for Lao New Year (Boun Pi Mai) lasts for three days from April 13 to April 15 so we shall miss the main celebrations leaving as we do today for  Hanoi. As in every country in the world a new year is the opportunity to get rid of the old and see in with the new. In Loas this is seen as atime of cleaning and purification and entails a thorough spring clean starting with the Buddha images which are removed from the temples and cleaned with scented water. As you can see our hotel took a more practical approach  to cleaning and blessing their stock of bicycles.

Once temples, houses, cars and bicycles have been cleaned the Loatians take to the streets to douse one another a further act of cleansing in anticiapation of the end of the dry season. It is as you can see from the firepower they bring to bear something they take very seriously. For water pistols read personal water cannon – and foreigners are a particular target.