Kamphaeng Phet Sart Thai Tradition and Banana Festival ~ Vietnam Adventure Holidays

Eat your hearts out FarmVille fans, this is the real deal, full bunches of bananas with real rosettes at a real farmers’ market, and a real one-crop festival.

Thailand’s Kamphaeng Phet Province holds their Sart Thai Buddhist Tradition and Banana Festival in September each year.

In 2009 it was during the second week of the month, and in 2010, it all revolves around the 23rd of the month and the full moon (Sart Thai is a Buddhist celebration that follows the full moon).

The Kluai Khai Fair is held to promote the species of banana for which the province is famous.

Over 200 million Baht value of bananas per year are exported from just this one province – roughly 4 million Pounds Sterling – which doesn’t sound a lot until you realise the local produce-market price for one of those full-length bunches is only 200 Baht … meaning roughly one million bunches are in the annual export figures. Each tree crops once a year, so you can imagine how intensively they’re planted and farmed.

Bananas are one of the world’s most important food crops. Aside from the common export banana (the Cavendish), there are about 1000 other varieties of bananas. Some bananas are blue, others are orange or red, some are round, and a few are as big as your arm. In the tropics, bananas aren’t only eaten fresh, they’re barbecued, they’re deep-fried, they’re sun-dried, their flowers are used in salads – instead of lettuce, they’re even made into beer and wine.

The local banana dessert, krayasart is a wonderful, sweet, sticky, granola-like concoction made with peanuts, sesame seeds, rice, etc. For some reason this is mostly made during the banana festival, which has competitions for the best krayasart there.

Thai bananas are far more tasty than those of most other countries, and you wouldn’t believe how many varieties there are, which is just as well, because the festival includes a banana-eating competition (race?). I can’t envision it as being a particularly captivating spectator sport … unless they have a women’s competition too

Aside from the eating and producer competitions, there are the cookery competitions for making of krayasat, as well as many entertainment performances provided by both traditional and modern performing arts. Of course, being Thailand, no festival is complete without a beauty competition and pageant. Kampaeng Phet is no exception and hosts the Miss Banana Queen pageant during the festival.

Being a rural province, the festival also brings to town a wealth of handicrafts and cottage industry products for exhibition and sales at OTOP markets, set up just for the festival. It’s said that every temple in Kamphaeng Phet province hosts events of some description during the Kluai Khai Fair & Sart Thai Festival, I haven’t tried to test that claim – it would be impossible.

Kampaeng Phet City is a very quiet, peaceful town in the lower part of Northern Thailand forming a border province between the northern and central regions of the country. It has a famous historical park, protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, comprising the ruins of an ancient city and temple complex.

In that respect it is similar to more famous sites at Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, and Phimai, but has a distinctiveness of its own, with the archaeology and temple styles having more in common with Chiang Mai and Wieng Kum Kam far to the north of it.

Very few tourists visit Kampaeng Phet, which is a shame because it’s a great little town, with a peaceful, and almost untrodden, vast archaeological site.

More about Bananas – they are always in season, providing a continuous, year-round, source of food in developing nations. More than 400 million people depend on them as a staple food source. In our rapidly changing world, both cultivated and wild bananas are highly threatened by climate change, deforestation, and a new banana-killing fungus. Some scientists predict that the banana industry will collapse within 5-20 years, and that many wild banana species are facing extinction