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I went to Chiang Mai to play with elephants. So learning how to ride a scooter at the highest point in the country was unexpected. I did predictably crash a little bit. But I especially didn’t expect happenstance to leave me as the only foreign national at an utterly random village festival. Things began when I planned to leave for Bangkok. Instead one of the hostel staff, Max, mentioned the festival. I wish I could tell you what the festival was. I really do. All I got for a description was ‘local.’ Still in a few minutes I’d thrown my plans out the window and agreed to go anyway. When the evening approached, I was bundled into a taxi van along with my hostel owner, who inexplicably answered to the name Big, plus Max and a good chunk of their family. It felt like an hour passed before we peeled off, somewhere around Ban Nong Phueng, onto some quieter roads that trundled us up to Big’s family home. Music was already pumping, a mountain of food had been whipped up, money trees were being fashioned and lots of alcohol appeared before me. I threw myself into things as gamely as I could, and powered with liquid courage, found myself getting on well with the Big family, even with the massive language barrier. Dusk had fallen and darkness had closed in by the time we began our way to the promised festival. I realised it was time to leave when a giant truck adorned with disco lights drove past, blaring more music and leading a procession of dancing revellers. With a quick warning about my awful dancing, I joined onto the back of the parade, following the disco truck onwards. Someway into the parade Max pulled me aside just to agree about the state of my dancing. The procession continued for a long while until one of the kids cheated and hitched a ride on the back of the disco truck. I remain jealous of this ingenuity. As we danced into the heart of the village, crowds converged and collided with each other as everyone crowded into the temple complex to deliver offerings. After getting to check out the temple, I found myself amongst some market stalls where I picked up some bizarre dried pancake things to munch and wandered on until my jaw dropped. Beyond the market stalls stood an enormous stage and a heaving field of a few thousand people. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting from a local village festival, but this wasn’t it. After I managed to find someone who served me a plastic cup of Hong Thong whiskey, I rejoined my group and headed into the heart of the booming music. Wound up looking after one of the kids from Big’s family, accidentally became his favourite person and wound up with him on my shoulders for most of the night. Events took an even more surreal turn as I discovered the band on stage playing some ridiculous and absurd game of bingo with the lives of everyone in the field. People were handed numbered tickets. Then someone with a microphone read out numbers in Thai and if yours was called you got to charge up onto the stage for the duration of that song. I had no idea what was going on, or what numbers were being called. Not that the tickets were ever checked. So, events just descended into this utterly bizarre comedy sketch of running back and forth to dance in different places, trying not to fall over, trying not to drop the kid on my shoulders and trying to avoid injuring anyone else in the process, all punctuated by the random screaming of Thai raffle ticket numbers. Having had my fill of this musical bingo, I found my way to a Muay Thai ring and became engrossed at the ringside for the rest of the evening. It was only when our taxi van reappeared that I peeled my attention away from the combat to be whisked back to our hostel in the dead of night, leaving the entire uncanny experience as some bizarre fever dream in my head by the next day.