[Chiang Mai Ten Thousand People Sky Lantern Festival] The dangers of commercialization, the truth behind the beautiful photos

// The Ideal and Reality of Ten Thousand People’s Lantern Festival #100 Ways to Travel The Chiang Mai Ten Thousand Lantern Festival is said by some to be a festival that must be experienced once in a lifetime, and it is also one of the things on my bucket list. But probably the greater the expectations, the greater the disappointment. Aside from the fact that when I visited last year, the ticket price had already risen to over a thousand Hong Kong dollars, the entire event felt to me to be super commercial and dangerous. Let’s first talk about the overview of the activity. This Ten Thousand People Sky Lantern Festival event, also known as the Yeepeng Festival, is one of the celebrations during the Loy Krathong Festival in Thailand. The most iconic scene is that thousands of people send sky lanterns into the sky at the same time. However, in fact, releasing sky lanterns is not a traditional custom of the local Sky Lantern Festival, but a purely tourist activity. According to local friends, in fact, in celebrating the Loy Krathong Festival, only releasing water lanterns is their tradition, and sky lanterns have been the only one in the past 20 years. An activity that has only slowly begun to become popular. Then talk about the form of the activity. The venue of the Ten Thousand Sky Lantern Festival is located in a suburb about an hour away from Chiang Mai. Most tourists will join a local group of Ten Thousand Sky Lanterns in Chiang Mai and take a tour bus to arrive at the venue before 5 p.m. The venue is divided into different areas, including stalls providing food and drinks, places to place water lanterns, an area to pray under a big tree, an area for ethnic performances, etc. Therefore, after entering the venue, it is like going to a grand carnival. Visitors can eat, drink and have fun first according to their own preferences, and all activities in the venue (including food and drinks) are included in the ticket price. There are rows of chairs next to the stage of the main venue. Starting at about 6 o'clock, visitors can officially sit down and wait for the performances and festival ceremonies on the stage to officially begin. As for the lighting of the sky lanterns, around eight o'clock, everyone must follow the command of the conference and act in unison (the venue has radio broadcasts in three languages: Thai, English and Japanese). Let me tell you why I am so disappointed with this event. First of all, basically 99% of the sky lantern releasing venues are foreign tourists. Most Thais will not pay to participate in this event. They will only release water lanterns or sky lanterns on the banks of the Mae Ping River in Chiang Mai, or in the old town of Chiang Mai. Watch the float parade. Therefore, there is actually no traditional festival atmosphere in the venue, it is more like going to Disneyland. More importantly, sky lantern releasing activities are actually very dangerous. Although the place was very empty, tens of thousands of people gathered in an area that was far from sparse, lighting up sky lanterns at the same time, and (surprisingly) it turned out that most tourists didn't know that the air inside the sky lanterns actually heats up and expands. , the excess gas will be squeezed out, and the sky lanterns will rise slowly (and the conference does not have enough staff to help tourists light up the sky lanterns). The result is that there are constantly burning sky lanterns falling from high altitudes, and there are hundreds of them. The fire was burning on the ground, and even my hair was almost burned by the sky lanterns placed randomly by the two Germans next to me. The most exaggerated thing is that just a few minutes after the sky lantern display started, the stage at the main venue of the Sky Lantern Festival was on fire. I remember thinking that this was part of the performance. It wasn’t until I saw the staff rushing on stage to move the instruments away from the fire scene that I realized that the fire was an accident. After other tourists realized that it was an accident, they also began to run away. However, because there were too many fires burning on the ground, people tripped and fell frequently in the chaos, and almost trampled on others. But what's interesting is that after about a minute of escaping, the tourists began to slow down. They probably realized that the fire was under control and would not pose a danger to everyone's lives, so they continued to celebrate as usual, setting off sky lanterns. , check in and check in, chat and chat. Okay, I'm done saying how I feel. To be fair, the photos taken on this day are indeed beautiful, and the video has received a lot of likes on IG. But precisely because of this, it made me feel even more ironic, probably because I knew that I didn't actually enjoy this activity very much. The usual instagram vs reality is just a joke, this time instagram vs reality There is a real gap in reality for me. Behind the beautiful photos is a mess of reality.