Good vibes and laid-back rhythms at the Reggae Festival in Pai

Posted by paul on February 25th, 2008 filed in Uncategorized

It all happened two weeks ago. Desperate visitors wandered around while carrying their entire gear, unsuccessful looking for a place to spend a night or two. However, the guesthouses and even the rooms at the fancy resort were all occupied as huge crowds of Ska and Reggae freaks had invaded the town. Thousands of young and old music fans coming from allover the world kept on arriving at this little, bohemian mountainous town located in the province of Mae Hong Son.

Laid-back reggae rhythms dominated Pai’s ambience for two days

Two weekends ago the third Reggae Festival took place in Pai. This year’s edition of the two days lasting festival was focused on the necessary battle against the catastrophic effects of global warming. Independent environmental organisations including Greenpeace promoted the important message.

The festival was again organised by, the world-famous in Pai, Amnui who’s nicknamed Dang Cowboy. He only had put a little bit of energy in promoting the event. However, the amount of people doubled compared with last year’s edition. Dang didn’t spend much many on promotion but his many friends had spread the message, which seemingly worked very well.

This year around 5,000 music lovers visited the festivals and many even came from as far as Australia and Europe. Dang was a satisfied man as the festival was a gigantic success. Outside the principal gates the musical celebration began as it was here where talented percussion and world music groups warmed the crowd up for the headliners.

The main performance stage was constructed across a small bamboo-made bridge through the awesome Treehouse Resort. Positioned around the stage’s edge, self-described hippies were selling clothes, jewellery and various tasty snacks. T-Bone and Palmy attracted crowds of dancing fans while a large part of the festival goers were glad to gather around several campfires enjoying the songs from a distance and meeting new friends from all over the globe.

The scene was extremely chilled with cool music, free-spirited people and positive vibes. It was pretty clear that the performing musicians appreciated the peaceful atmosphere as the buzzing audience was the main stimulating factor for them to continuously having big smiles on their faces. Guide to northern Thai culture.

One of the other reasons why Amnui organised this year’s event was to draw attention to the negative side effects of too much development in the town and the surrounding environment. The grown of the tourist infrastructure has also resulted in more garbage throughout the town.

Today, plastic bags, empty beer and soda cans, thrown away by brainless tourists, can be found everywhere. It seems that the environment is suffering from the presence of the businessmen’s profitable projects. The largest part of the money raised by the festival will be used for the benefit of the regional hill tribe peoples. One goal is to buy a number of computers for several hill tribe children schools.

It was on Sunday 3:30 in the early morning when the festival came to an end. Exhausted but thrilled music fans experienced it as a real bummer having to leave that unique community, which had been spontaneously created over the two festival days. I and probably thousands of other music fans truly hope there will be a fourth edition next year. Yeah mon, Rastaman vibration is positive!