Fire, I'll take you to burn

Not stars -- lanterns

My iPhone camera cannot possibly capture the trippy theatricality of a night sky dotted with Thai fire lanterns – especially as they rise into the burst zone of a tremendous fireworks display alarmingly close overhead. For the hundreds of revelers packed onto the narrow Iron Bridge at the climax of Loi Krathong, there is no lag time between flash and boom as cinders rain down our upturned faces. "Gangnam Style" blasting from the Bus Bar next door totally works for this spectacle.

Everyone else is playing with fire, so we join in the fun: I buy a 40-baht paper lantern from a street vendor – there’s one every 10 feet, and they’re all mobbed with customers. He assembles the contraption for me: each lantern includes a solid fuel ring suspended by cross-wires at the base of a flame-resistant fabric hood. You ignite the fuel ring, wait for the hot air to fully inflate the hood, and then let go. The important word is “wait” – Lian and I launch our lantern off the bridge too soon and it plummets into the river, fizzling out. A while later we try our hand at the small floral Loi Krathong candle boats that people set adrift on the river to honor the water spirits. But our candles sputter out before we can even get our boats to the river’s edge. We would suck as pyromaniacs.

Awwww!

Lian is intent on not missing “the profession” and for the longest time I have no idea what she is talking about. Once again our very dog-eared Thai-English dictionary clears things up: proCESsion, i.e., parade. But she still calls it the profession.

Loi Krathong rocks Chiang Mai long into the evening, but after four days of music and pyrotechnics we can pretty much tune it out, like living near train tracks. By Friday the entire town looks like The Morning After, a landscape of fallen fire lantern carcasses strewn everywhere.

The Mae Ping River is clogged with banana-leaf floral boats. Serf-class street sweepers with their twig brooms are scraping spent bottle rockets and firecracker remains into loose piles that someone eventually will pick up, or maybe the rains will wash them away.

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Amazing crispy fish, one of many courses.

Friday evening we meet up with our old friend Mr. Tong at the terrific open-air restaurant he turned us onto a few months back. We feast with abandon over beers and scotch. This time it’s my treat and the entire evening, including tip, comes to $24. We get home around 11 and I check email before turning in. Surprise! A client has scheduled a last-minute phone conference that begins 3:30 a.m., Thailand time, which I force myself to stay up for. I predict that there’s an afternoon nap in my future.