In the dark, warm night, we trudged under the weight of our 40lbs packs. We’d just spent four hours ripping down the highway in the back of a songthaew (essentially a taxi pickup truck) after missing our bus to Chiang Rai and had gotten dropped off downtown, four kilometres away from our hotel. It had been a rough, bumpy drive and I was grumpy, hungry and tired.
As we followed the road towards our lodgings, the streets slowly emptied and the vendors, shops and people made way for sporadic traffic and discontinuous sidewalks. “Great…” I thought, “We’re going to get to the middle of nowhere and there’s going to be nothing to eat nearby”. With sore feet and stiff backs, we rounded a bend in the road when suddenly, a cacophonous explosion of light and people burst out in front of us.
In our tired state, it was hard to understand exactly what we were looking at. Tall 10m structures covered in neon lights towered on each side of a road jam-packed with food stands and people. It seemed like thousands upon thousands of people had appeared out of nowhere, all heading down a side road towards what seemed to be some kind of fairground. As we got closer, the visceral thumps of competing music stages lay down a soundtrack to this unexpected festival scene.
“This looks awesome!” Emma exclaimed. While I was still pretty grumpy, the sight and smells of innumerable food trucks made it impossible to disagree. Our hotel was thankfully only 10 minutes away so we rushed over, dropped our bags and started back towards this mysterious party.
We approached the entrance to the festival with a mix of excitement and trepidation. BANG! An explosive crack ripped through the air making us both jump. BANG BANG! More detonations punctuated the din of the festivities. We spun around looking for the source of the noise to see a group of youths casually lighting firecrackers and tossing them in all directions. Towards the festival grounds, Roman candles crackled and erupted towards the ski. Every 45 seconds, it seemed like someone was blowing something up.
It’s hard to accurately describe what the next few hours were like. Wandering the festival felt like entering a different world. The grounds were intensely packed with people who filled the available space between a bizarre array of food stands selling everything from live eels in ziplock bags to fried octopus on a stick. Hot cooking stoves fueled by rusty propane tanks cooked up meals inches away from the crowd and with the incessant sound of DIY fireworks overhead, I couldn’t help but think we were walking through a giant bomb, one drunk misstep away from going off.
Chiang Rai’s surreal/weird White Temple.
This was the annual festival of Loy Krathong. Loy Krathong translates to "float ritual vessel or lamp”, and celebrates the Goddess of Water. The krathongs are decorative, floating baskets lit with candles and sent down the river as offerings to the Goddess. Throughout the evening, people would walk down to the river that flowed along the fairgrounds and send off krathongs into the night. It was a beautiful sight to see these lit vessels of good intentions slowly flow toward the Mekong River.
We got back to our hotel, exhausted, and flopped down onto our fancy beds. Tired but happy to have experienced this unique event, we went to sleep to the sounds of far-away fireworks hurtling through the ski.
This marked our last few days in Thailand before going into Laos and we couldn't have asked for a better sendoff. Next stop, Huay Xai.
