We spent our New Years in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Chiang Mai is a serious New Years destination for vacationing thais. As we arrived in town, we quickly learned that the city was filling up fast and as the days wound down towards New Years, Chiang Mai began to burst at the seems with incoming Thais. Trying to find plane tickets out of the city was hard but an unexpected benefit was that white faces became few and far in-between. It was wonderful to be enjoying the city amongst people from all over Thailand.
During the few days leading up to New Years, Thais have a tradition of lighting paper lanterns, making a few wishes and letting them float on up into the sky. Locals, vacationing thais and tourists alike congregated in the Thae Phae Gate area of the city to launch lanterns. You could see a steady stream of lanterns rising in to the sky and following a similar trajectory, literally hundreds of thousands, each night, seen from anywhere in the city and as far away as the Doi Suthep wat temple on the mountain range overlooking Chiang Mai. It was a gorgeous sight and every night the steady stream of lanterns got thicker and thicker.
On New Years Eve, we headed down to the city center, enjoying the blocks and blocks of vendors and food stalls. We ate like fiends: green papaya salad, pad thai, thai iced tea, mango sticky rice and at least 4 other things, that to this day, i still don’t know the names of. All in the spirit of trying anything and everything. Thailand has good food. After stuffing ourselves, we headed down to the gate area to watch the show, snap flicks of the crowd lighting off a gazillion paper lanterns and wait for the promised countdown. We couldn’t really figure out why, but the simulcast abruptly stopped, the show was discontinued and we could see military trucks anxiously watching the crowd. I was interviewed by a local media crew, who caught me off-guard, by asking me if I had known that there is a general curfew in Thailand and technically, no one was ’supposed’ to be there. I kinda stuck my hands in my pockets and raised my shoulders in a vague tourist-ignorance. Midnight came and went and no countdown, so in true anarchical fashion the crowd just decided to do one big countdown and we all celebrated the New Year together, blissfully unaware of the what we’d find out later, while walking home, that there had been several terrorist attacks in Bangkok and that the military had shut the simulcast down without telling any of the people assembled at the gate. After being told the news, it was a somber end to a pretty good New Years.
