Today I’m going to head out to the village for a very odd sounding religious holiday. It’s a localised thing, not something that is celebrated all over Thailand. Basically the entire village will spend the day cooking lots of food, and then they will set it all out as a feast, for the ghosts of dead family members to eat.

Once the ghosts are finished, the living people get to eat everything that is left over, personally I think it’s an excuse to have a bloody great party but who cares, I love Isaan food so I hope the ghosts are not too hungry!

The last seven days have been the most boring seven days of my life, I am talking mind numbing boring, trapped in a place that is not my home, unable to go outside and unable to leave. Let me explain.

My girlfriend and Son spend the week staying with her father in a small village about 15 minutes away from the apartment in town that I rent, we have found this the best way all round, it means I have peace to work in the week, she gets to take care of her father and stay with her family, and we have a good time at the weekends when she comes to stay with me. During the week I drive out to the village two or three times to have lunch and play with the baby for a while so she gets a break.

So last Friday morning I jumped on my motorcycle and rode out to the village, it started to rain on the way, very heavy rain, as it had done for several days previously. I stayed for a few hours then decided to head home, I drove out of the village, pulled out on to the main road and drove a couple of kilometres before finding the road was flooded, I continued on very slowly, driving through water several centimetres deep, until I came to the road bridge over the river, one major problem here, the bridge wasn’t there anymore, just a gap in the road and a raging torrent streaming through it. I had no choice but to turn around and head back to the village, I figured I would stay the night and things would dry up in the morning and I would find another way to cross the river. How wrong I was, the rain continued non-stop until the next morning, the TV was telling us that the entire province was flooded and the rain was not going to stop for several days.

Each day the water rose higher, eventually completely flooding almost all of the farm land around the village, check out this picture above, this used to be rice fields just outside the village, now completely ruined by the floods. So there I was, trapped in my girlfriend’s village, unable to leave the house let alone get back to my apartment. The rain stopped 3 days ago, it has only been today that I was able to navigate the still flooded roads and drive home.

The real problems will start next year though, an entire region with its yearly rice crop ruined, many of the farmers grow the rice to feed their families, not to sell, I really do not know what these people will do next year, rice is the backbone of their staple diet, without it they will have very little to eat and no money to buy rice.