East, West, Far East (or Roots & Wings): Festival of Lights

PWe were lucky enough to come up here in time for the famous Yi Peng and Loy Krathong festivals, which occur together on the days surrounding the full moon in the 10th month.

First up are a few parade shots, as there was one on each of the three festival nights.

Loy Krathong involves creating small floating offerings out of bamboo, banana leaves, & flowers, and filling them with offerings of incense, candles and maybe coins. People float these down the river as a gesture of getting rid of bad luck and as an offering to the water goddess.

At the same time, for the Yi Peng festival, people release white paper lanterns called Khom Loy into the air. With this you release bad luck and can also make a wish. These are the sort of iconic fixture of the festival and they are mesmorizingly beautiful, but extremely hard to capture well in a photo. It also leaves you feeling a bit bad for the environment. We did help some friends launch one and on the last night we added our own lantern to the madness.

The skies were cloudy so there were no stars, it's only lanterns in the pictures below.

We interrupt your lantern festival to offer some delicious bugs...grasshoppers, cicadas, cockroaches, silk worms....anyone? Anyone?

Back to the lights then..

As the nights got later, people were more reckless with fireworks and the lanterns. We saw fireworks veer off into the crowd and Matt had hot wax (or something) drop onto his shoulder from the sky and leave a mark. People would let go of the lanterns too early and they would go sideways into the crowd or fall straight into the river. We saw one group of three drop two into the river, somehow burn one on the sidewalk, and release the fourth beneath the only string of lights on the bridge. Unfortunately, I think they were American...

Here are some other lantern fails..