The Lao New Year (Bun Pi Mai Lao) is still days off, but already the street corners of Luang Probang are well-garrisoned with children getting a jump on the Songkan, or water festival. During the hottest part of the day, when it gets close to 100 degrees and the humidity of the river makes the air feel like baked Mekong mud, these little mobs of mostly pre-teens armed with water guns, super soakers, and plain old buckets gleefully soak any and all who pass their posts. While they especially like to douse people on scooters, there is no higher fun, apparently, than a game called soak the falang. Hosing down foreigners sends them into fits of hilarity.

I took a mid-afternoon stroll with my travel companions Richard and Paul. I had changed some money into the local currency, the Kip, which lately trades at about 10,000 to the dollar. Many establishments accept Thai Bhat or even better US dollars here, and plenty of menus list prices in dollars. But change comes in Kip, which is subject to frequent fluctuations. It’s a seriously confusing situation, so I decided to solve it by changing some US cash into Kip. On this day, one hundred US bought me just over a million kip, and so feeling like a bigshot with a wad of bills the size of a precious roll of toilet paper wrapped up in rubber bands we hit the town.

Turns out a cold beer runs about twenty grand. Still cheap by any standard, but it sort of puts my millionaire status into perspective. (And in a country without ATMs, you don’t even get the pleasure of seeing your balance in Kip).

So as we were discussing the relative prices in South East Asia and hunting down an English language bookstore we’d read about, we walked into the firing line of a gleeful gaggle of kids brandishing pails and buckets. Any doubts about whether or not foreigners are considered a target were quickly resolved as we got a thorough rinsing while peels of laughter erupted up and down the block.

Richard would have none of this, so with his litre water bottle in hand, he went on the offensive, dousing the two kids who had just unloaded on him. Then in a move that shocked them all, he went for the big water trough were they had all been filling up and reloaded with their ammo. A spray of ten to twleve year olds (already wet, mind you) went squealing away down the street to load up at the next bucket.

Then someone noticed me taking pictures of this whole melee and pointed out that I was only partially wet. Two or three kids provided me with a proper demonstration of the cooling properties of evaporation.

This little scene repeated itself block after block all afternoon. By the time we sat down for a beer later, I was pulling squishy 20,000 Kip notes of my dripping wad of bills. Happy Lao New Year.