Holi Day

After asking "So when is Holi Day?" to almost everyone we met in our entire time in India and always getting different and vaguer answers, the festival finally arrived. It started with a little bus trip to a local market, spotting a couple of people with colours sparsely sprinkled on a few parts of their bodies. When we arrived, however, we were faced with a full on colour fight. About twenty men were all heavily involved in splattering themselves in as many colours as possible. All of them clutched several bags of powdered dye. Our error was stopping, watching and, I think essentially, photographing. We were quickly targets. It started with a small, green smear each on the face (this is the part of the body they always went for. This then quickly became a beacon that we were fair game and an hour later we had been attacked around ten times and had most of the colours available displayed on our skin. It was hilarious. We then got a bus to another market, Anjuna. In Anjuna people were a little more professional about the whole affair. It wasn't just smearing dye on your face it was pre-mixing the dye with water and launching it with bottles and water guns. We walked around 100 yards from the bus stop to the market, it took about an hour, and we literally didn't have a space left on our clothes that hadn't been coloured. It got so bad that in the end we picked up two five year old girls to help run the 'gauntlet' sections of the road. There was colour everywhere. On people, the houses, the roads, the stalls and the cows. It was brilliant.