Every April, from the 13th to the 16th, Cambodia celebrates the Khmer New Year, known in the local language as "Chaul Cham Thmey." The holiday marks the end of the planting season and the beginning of the new solar year. Traditionally, it's the time for families to come together before the rains arrive. The celebration bears a strong resemblance to the Thai festival of Songkran, which is also observed in Laos. I'd say the Khmer version is more refined, more elegant, nearly unstaged. Songkran in Thailand has become so famous that everything is heavily produced and angled toward the tourism it draws. Last year the biggest celebration took place at Angkor Wat, but this year it was held here in Phnom Penh.

The festivities begin with prayers and chanting at the temples (pagodas), carried out every day across nearly all of them throughout the city. I live across the street from one of the most important pagodas in Phnom Penh, Wat Botum Vathey, which means I've had plenty of chances to take part in, wander over to, and simply observe whatever unfolds there.

Candles and incense are lit, and food is offered to the Tevada Chhnam Thmey, the celestial guardian of the New Year. Buddha sculptures are bathed in scented water. People arrive dressed in sarongs woven with gold thread, or something that reads as gold (the traditional dress for this kind of celebration). Families donate food and money to the monks, who offer blessings in return. Alongside all these ritual observances, traditional games are organized, some involving seeds used as decoys, and people get thoroughly doused with water. Everyone goes out at night prepared to get wet, to laugh, and to celebrate. Being soaked, and soaking others, carries a traditional meaning of purification. There's also talcum powder thrown into the mix, which not everyone appreciates anymore and which, inhaled, is genuinely bad for the throat and lungs. Apparently they banned it this year, but plenty of people kept tossing it around along with the water.

I've been to this celebration before and found it wonderful and genuinely interesting, but I don't think I'll go back, because in certain parts of the city you literally cannot move. Everything is decorated the way we in the West decorate for Christmas. In the temples, miniature stupas are built to represent the universe, constructed from sand and adorned with small flags representing the cardinal points of the cosmos. The whole thing is meant to rebuild, communally, the harmony of the world for the coming cycle. What makes this celebration distinct, even within Asia, is something very particularly Khmer: a way of honoring the impermanence of life with a splash of scented water and a genuinely meant smile.