When we planned our trip to Thailand, we randomly chose mid to late November as it was a time when fewer people from work were traveling and allowed us ample time to travel. When we provided our dates to Mana, he assumed we were planning on attending the Loy Krathong festival. I had to google it as I had no idea what he was talking about. Once we learned that it is the lantern festival in Thailand and occurs only once per year and only in Chiang Mai, we were in.
Here is the display from our hotel
But dinner was first. The girls were a little tired of rice or pad thai, so it was lucky that we stumbled across a new food called Rotee (also spelled roti in Thailand). I think it is an Indian street food where a small piece of dough is tossed thin then fried on this neat skillet that is slightly depressed in the middle. An egg is scrambled and mixed with your choice of fillings. In our case, banana.
They then add the filling to the dough then fold the edges over it. Once it is squared and cooked, they chop it into 9-12 bites and drizzle it with your choice of toppings. For us, chocolate syrup and sweetened condensed milk. So delicious. Great find.
We then grabbed some more food, don't remember what, but the kids enjoyed it.
Due to the fireworks, Hazel was more concerned with plugging her ears than eating.
Then it happened, we saw the floating lanterns!
Baskets and lanterns are sold at a very cheap price in the streets so we just grabbed some on our way to one of the Buddhist temples where our guide was taking us
Due to risks to flights, the launching of lanterns is limited to this one day a year and only after 9 pm. It was 8 pm and our kids were falling apart. Then this nice Chinese family decided they had waited long enough. This of course attracted the attention of one of the officers there making sure people adhere to the rules. The lantern was lit so after being chastised their looks of "well now what? it is lit!" he finally let them launch the lantern.
This set things in motion and after that everyone started launching their lanterns.
First, we wanted to set our baskets in the water.
We made our way through the thick crowd to the water front.
Here are the girls with their baskets. Baskets are supposed to be biodegradable but many people still use Styrofoam which is funny because the purpose of the lantern is to thank the river for bringing water during the past year and apologize for polluting it. What better way to apologize than polluting more right?
Girls had fun with the baskets, but no time to waste - bedtime was calling so we moved on to the lanterns.
We bought a pack of 5 lanterns so the girls could have several chances to send them up. Here we are receiving some help on our first lantern as we had no idea what we were doing.
The lantern contains a ring of paper soaked in wax that is sustained by a wooden frame that you break slightly with your fingers then light on fire. Once it gets going and heats the air inside the lantern, it gets really hot.
Here is a better look.
The look on Charlotte's face was a mix of caution and fatigue, but they were both really excited for this, but probably not as much as I was.
Random cute Thai boy with a minion basket.
Here I opened the shutter to try to catch the lanterns a bit better.
And this explains why Jari was not in many pictures. She preferred to take the pictures rather than be in them as her hands were full.
The end results once the wax burns out.
Really fun night. So glad we got to do this. If anyone else wants to go, the date changes every year as it is based on the lunar cycle. I think it is always the 11th or 12th full moon of the year.
An attempt to photograph the valley from the top of our hotel.
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