Loi Kratong…an age old Thai festival,where the Thai people pay respects to the spirits of the water at the end of the rainy season and place beautiful decorative floating ‘baskets’, adorned most often with intricate flower designs, incense sticks and a candle, onto the nearest waterway in a symbolic gesture to float away that years sins, and send up paper lanterns into the night sky for good luck.
Well that’s the gist of the original festival. These days in Chiang Mai , as with many of the festivals, it appears to be an opportunity to throw off the usual Thai reserve and go crazy for an evening.
After all, Loi Kratong translates into “Make your own mind up”.
Maybe that’s a little unfair. Many , many Thais do their best to perform the ceremony in a quiet respectful manner. And the parade clearly involves a lot of hard work and dedication and is quite wonderful.
To see the night sky fill with a new set of stars for the evening, as thousands of lanterns are sent up is also a wonder to behold.
But for me the noise of thousands more fireworks going off and often being thrown carelessly around in the midst of thronging crowds somehow brings quite a downer onto what should be a very spiritual event.
Enough of the stick in the madness. If you can handle dodging firecrackers , often thrown in the direction of ‘farang’ by Thai youths testing your reaction, and don’t mind giving your ear drums a battering for the evening, it is one of those ‘must do events’ and great party atmosphere.
You can view more photographs like these in our Photobucket.com albums
Having just opened the Stratton House Childrens Home I was unsure of what we would do for Loi Kratong. In the end we split the evening between a quiet village celebration in Mae Salab and a run into the centre of the Old City in Chiang Mai where Boon helped our first child, Jack, join in this colourful celebration close to the Three Kings Monument.
The skies were filled with many hundreds of paper lanterns similar to the one we sent up.
