Tomorrow, the 13th April, Thailand celebrates the Songkran water festival - perhaps best known for the Thai custom of sprinkling water over each other as a "good luck" blessing. The traditional sprinkling usually takes the form of a traditionally dressed Thai lady wetting her fingers with perfumed water from a small bowl held in one hand and delicately sprinkling the "blessed" with a few drops.

Coming during the peak of the hottest season of the year, Songkran also attracts many overseas tourists for the festival yet over the years the traditional sprinkling has degenerated to wholesale drenchings, particularly at traditional "water throwing" areas such as Khao San in Bangkok. The last two years saw the excess reach a peak as super-soaker water guns and just plain old buckets and hoses ruled the day. Even taxi passengers stopped at traffic lights were warned to keep their doors locked from the inside, and motorcyclists invariably were soaked after traveling a few blocks.

Yet this year is different. SARS has cut a swathe through not only tourist arrivals but also domestic tourism (see our travel news for alerts) as Thais and visitors avoid crowded areas. The more pessimistic of tourism figures have predicted that tourist arrivals in April will be down 40% year on year. As Bangkok gets soaked this year, foreign tourism has dried up, and Thais are being offered daily rates at some of Bangkok's top hotels including the new Peninsula Bangkok for the unheard-of rate of 500 Baht (around $12 USD).

As i wander around Bangkok today, the streets are deserted - but its hard to tell how much is due to the downturn in incoming tourists or the usual pilgrimage back home for the great majority of Bangkok workers who were not born here and whose families reside "up country". Yours truly avoids the "water-throwing" and tourist places so you may have to read reports from there elsewhere.

I can report however that the government has made considerable efforts to tone down the worst excesses this year, even going so far to ban what the Thai's call "spaghetti tops", for fear of what may happen to such seemingly precariously suspended protectors of modesty. Thailand is a very modest place and the baring of shoulders is not seen as polite in almost all circles, though they are popular amongst the young nightclub crowd. Yet the alternative suggestion by government ministers of wearing traditional Thai sarongs seems not much of an improvement. Racing away to avoid a bucket of water is an impossibility in such a get-up of course.

Songkran lasts officially a few days and business comes to a stop during the Songkran public holidays. Invariably however, the festivities of Songkran usually last around a week. Don't expect to hear much from your Thailand colleagues, clients or associates for the whole of next week. In the meantime Mai Pen Rai and Happy Songkran!