Last Wednesday was Thailand’s annual Loi Krathong festival: a holiday for dedicated to the rivers– mae naam, mother water— expressing gratitude for its life-giving renewal, and apologizing for using it and polluting it.
The holiday is celebrated by setting krathong (literally, baskets), carrying incense and candles, afloat on the river. Although, traditionally, every family would make their own krathong, in the age of consumerism, Wednesday’s streets were filled with vendors selling pre-made baskets, such as these:
The festival is to Thailand as the Fourth of July is to the United States– everyone comes out to celebrate it; I’ve never seen Bangkok’s streets so full people. An estimated 1.26 million krathong were released in Bangkok alone (down from last year’s 1.46 million, the decrease owing to an increase in the number of families and other groups releasing a single, large krathong rather than many smaller baskets). For myself, I joined up with a Sun (far left), Nam Pueng (to right of Sun) and a few other international students.
This photo was taken on the ferry we took out onto the river, near the Rama IX bridge:
The river, where millions of krathong were released, was also the scene of the holiday’s Thai-style parade. Countless ornately decorated boats (or floats, at it were..), each representing a different organization, went up the river, in a spectacular array of pyrotechnics, glowing neon and larger-than-life depictions of scenes from the Ramayana, such as Thammasat’s float, below:
Another random float:
According to tradition (of which I have more to write), you’re supposed to make a wish when you release your krathong. If it stays afloat (and doesn’t tip over), your wish will come true. Of course, I’m not a sentimentalist, and couldn’t even think of a wish to make, much less remember to make a wish while trying to drop a basket with a flaming candle on top into tumlutous water from a rocking boat such that the basket didn’t tip over… Although the candle went out immediately, the basket didn’t tip, and I suppose I could glibly note that, par consequence, I now have everything that I wished for. =)
The traditions around Loi Krathong extend beyond the river. Loi Krathong also doubles as Thailand’s version of Valentine’s Day, and couples who don’t release a krathong together often release separate krathong, with the belief that if the two float side by side down the river, the lovers’ relationship will be steady for a long time to come. Conversely, if the krathong drift apart, so will the two who set them afloat. Amusingly, Josh noted that he observed someone plunge into the river to reset the course of a wayward krathong with another’s. The Thais will also often include a little hair on their krathong, but to do so this year they would have needed to plan ahead, since Loi Krathong fell on a Wednesday, and it’s bad luck to cut your hair or fingernails on a Wednesday (in fact, some barber shops don’t open on Wednesdays).
Later in the evening, I had a chance to spend some time looking out from the roof of my apartment down onto the canal adjoined by a park below. Out on the Chao Phraya river, where I released my krathong, only the most hearty of candles stayed lit for more than a few seconds, owing to a slight breeze and the multitude of boats moving through the water, tossing the krathong like toy boats on choppy seas. Unlike the Chao Phraya, however, few boats passed through the canal near my apartment, and I had the privilege of, for maybe two hours, watching hundreds and hundreds of krathong– only distinguishable as a spot of light in the darkness, floating down the canal as little beacons of light, looking something like (below), gradually tapering from multitude of little yellow lights to a solitary one or two where the glass-like canal joined the tempestuous river…
(not my photo)
My favorite part, however, were the miniature hot-air balloons that some people released instead: maybe two feet across and five tall (think the size of a 55-gallon barrel), they were basically bags made out of a super-light cloth with some sort of sterno-esque burner clipped to the bottom. When released, they would shoot up in the sky, a brilliant-yellow, fast rising explosion of light… going up countless of hundreds and perhaps thousands of feet in the air, becoming one with the stars before running out of fuel and falling back to earth…
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Of course, Loi Krathong wasn’t all just happy people happily releasing beautiful little boats into the river. Although down from last year’s 25%, an estimated 20% of the krathong released this year were made with a Styrofoam bottom, rather than the heavier, traditional banana-tree ring. Although the city did its best to clean the river after the festival (it is rather ironic, that they would apologize to the river for polluting it by… filling it with pretty pollution), I haven’t been able to go near the river or a canal without seeing the aftermath of putting some 250,000 pieces of Styrofoam into the river.
Like Valentine’s Day in the ‘States, Loi Krathong is a very popular time for young couples to go and shack up, so to speak (and is, I’m told, the most common day for a girl to lose her virginity). To try to counter this woe-some moral decay, Bangkok’s Minister of Social Development and Human Security, Watana Muangsook, created police checkpoints equipped with spotlights outside of 58 of Bangkok’s more popular hotels, with the purpose of shining a spotlight on young couples as they entered the hotel in order to embarrass the young couples into not having sex. (This came a few days after Watana’s proposal that wives “should prostrate themselves before their husbands to foster love and happiness within the family.”) This was not only is this an egregious invasion of privacy, but also an abuse of power well beyond Shanawa’s constitutional limits. Of course, no one does anything. They just say “yeah, that sucks. Too bad there’s nothing we can do about it.” And, of course, this is all taking place with the Prime Minister’s sanction: PM Taksin has become natorious for his frequent and drastic cabinet re-shuffling, but Shanawa’s position seems to be quite secure.
