The Yi Peng Lantern Release: In Photos
My sole reason for returning to Chiang Mai was so that I could finally witness the Yi Peng lantern festival in person. Narrowly missing it by about a week last year and subsequently having to look at my friends’ amazing photos for the next week had Dave and I jealously vowing that we would be back in Chiang Mai to see it in 2012. Yi Peng is a traditional Northern Thailand festival, which takes place around the same time as Loy Krathong and is an event for making merit, meditating and releasing floating paper lanterns, symbolic of letting go of worries and making wishes for the future. The biggest and best of these events takes place at Mae Jo University, 20 kilometres north of Chiang Mai. To keep too many tourists from attending they don’t announce the actual date of the release until a month or so beforehand, meaning that Dave and I had to keep our travel plans very loose over the last few months! Despite a lot of stress and confusion, and me being convinced that my curs...