Warning: Explicit Content - Phuket Vegetarian Festival

We had the good luck to be in Phuket during the annual vegetarian festival. The event is a nine day festival running for the first nine days of the ninth month of the Chinese calendar, and honours nine emperor gods. The festival consists, in most of Thailand, of the public preparation and consumption of vegetarian foods. In Phuket and a few other cities it becomes far more complex, a ritual celebration involving acts of self mutilation and street processions. The local myth is that the festival rose to prominence some 200 years ago, when a wandering Chinese circus troop took ill in Phuket. Thinking that they had offended the nine emperor gods, they engaged in various painful rites of flesh-mortification to appease the heavenly ennead .

According to our guide book, a more likely explanation is that the ascetic traditions of neighbouring Indian communities migrated to Phuket. Regardless, it's a bloody and good show.

Our boat from the Similan Islands docked on Oct. 28th, and the festival ended Oct. 30th. The night of the 29th involved fire walking, but owing to a misprint in the english version of the info pamphlet, and given the paucity of directions, by the time we found the shrine they were raking up the coals. So we set out early the next morning to visit a different local shrine that was to be the starting point for one of the final street processions. We arrived a little early, just in time to see people lining up their cars and setting off fireworks as a prelude to the grand parade. Jenna was soon bored, and asked whether this mulling around was all we had come to see. As if on cue....