Rando Photo 1: Songkran on the Moat (3238)

I have a lot of photos that I do nothing with. That’s not to say they’re bad photos, just that I don’t do much with them once they’re off my camera.

Inspired by an offhand comment by Xeni Jardin, I’m just going to put some out there. Mostly for me, and if anyone else likes them then great.

So I picked a random number – 3238, and checked my hard drive for that photo.

My wife walked in while I had this photo open, and said “I recognize that — it’s Chiang Mai!” The Flight of the Gibbon banner was the giveaway, even though it’s an attraction we never took in.

This was in the middle of Loi Krathong. While we were there, we were told the whole festival was Loi Krathong — loi being the paper lantern and krathong being the “boats” made of coconut leaves and trunks, holding flowers and candles.

Wikipedia tells me that’s not entirely accurate, with it actually being the confluence of two festivals — Loi Krathong (the floating basket festival) and Yi Peng (the floating lantern festival).

There’s obviously a bit more to the festivals than these rudimentary descriptions, and we were lucky enough to be hanging out with people from our school who explained the personal and spiritual significance of the festival(s). They both generally had to do with cleansing, and letting go of negativity through symbolic action.

After the description of the festival, we we honoured to make krathongs with our gracious hosts. I’ll post more about that later, as it’s a thing unto itself.

A few more khom loi shots: