front of our hotel we thought it would be only right to go and see what was going on! There was a huge papier mache giant with a big face and equally large moustache, we had been told by an Indian couple on our raft that this would be burned at some point. So we settled ourselves in the rooftop restaurant and waited for the celebrations to start. They didn’t disappoint! There were loads of fireworks, some incredibly loud bangers and firecrackers but there was also some of the more traditional pretty fireworks! Believe me there is a vast difference in safety codes between here and the UK, there was loads of people and kids setting these fireworks off willy nilly! They looked great but quite a few went slightly wayward, fortunately nobody appeared to get injured! The fireworks went on for ages and the echo round the valley was quite something, I’m not sure the cows and monkeys would be happy with what was going on, but it was an amazing site to watch. After a while groups of children all dressed up came

along and started running around the big giant, which had been stood up by this point. Other people seemed to join in and it looked like there were mock battles taking place between the groups of kids as they were dressed up in different coloured costumes. We didn’t have a clue what was going on but it looked like good fun! The next minute we saw everyone running like mad away from the giant before it blew! When I say blew I mean blew, we were sure that they had filled the feet of the thing with firecrackers or something similar as it went up in a flash, exploded and then burned itself out! WOW we weren’t expecting that, we thought it would be more like a bonfire type of thing! Nope it was up in flames and burned out in approximately 5 minutes! What was also mad was that it was being televised live and there was a TV on the rooftop, so we could watch it live and on the TV at the same time! So that seemed to be it, we presumed the festival would carry on in the main square over the river, but we’d