Buddha's Birthday (Boun Visakhaboucha)

This is the main Buddhist festival of the year and falls on the full moon in May. Boun Visakhaboucha is the day on which the Buddha was born, died and achieved Enlightenment. Families in Laos visit the local wat (temple) to pray.

In Luang Prabang there is a beautiful candlelit procession through the streets of this incredible city. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it boasts over 60 Buddhist temples, some of them more than 700 years old.

As part of the celebrations for this festival, Laotians build huge bamboo rockets which they fire at the rain god to bring down the first rains of the season. Beside the Mekong, most notably in Vientiane, hundreds of rockets explode into the sky in a riot of noise and colour. Originally a preserve of the monks, these days there is intense competition to build the most spectacular rocket between anyone who can lay their hands on some gunpowder! The prizes on offer, the betting that takes place, and the home-made nature of the rockets (!) make this a wild and spectacular occasion, not to be missed, and the accompanying processions and fertility dances make it even better. (A similar celebration can still be seen in the Isaan Province of Thailand at Yasothon)

In addition to the processions there are puppet shows and dancing with everyone dressed up in their very best clothes for the occasion.

Incidentally, there is an amazing Buddhist pilgrimage site an hour upriver from Luang Prabang named Pak Ou. It is an enormous limestone cave filled with thousands of Buddhist statues placed by pilgrims who have made a pilgrimage there during the last 1000 years. The Buddha images range from the minuscule to the gold-leaved life-size. A visit to Luang Prabang is not complete without experiencing this holy and awe-inspiring place.