Look On The Bright Side

I moved hotels today. It wasn’t much of a move actually. After checking out, I confused the concierge by declining a taxi (I only had to walk two properties over on the same beach). I needed one more night to stay in the area before my three-day-two-night trip to Khao Sok National Park and the new place was half the price of my second hotel (which was nearly half the price of the first).

In the late afternoon, I took a taxi today to a nearby town to watch the fifth anniversary Tsunami memorial service. The event was sub-titled – Look On The Bright Side. I don’t really see a bright side to hundreds of deaths and displacements and losses of livelihood, but I think they probably meant something like “let’s look to a brighter future or a better tomorrow”. It is not uncommon for Thai-English translations to not work out too well.

I arrived one hour early so I could wander around the local market which consisted of hundreds of stalls in typical Asian style (frenzy-mania). On offer was: hot meals, cold meals, fruits, fried insects, nuts, raw fish, raw meat and fresh spices – and of it was unpackaged and uncovered. Oops – not true – the food was covered – with flies. There were also stalls selling pirated DVDs and CDs, belts, perfume, handbags and clothes, in addition to countless souvenir booths. All prices were negotiable.

I walked over to the anniversary service hoping I had missed most of the speeches and religious elements (I knew I wouldn’t understand them anyway); I was mainly interested in witnessing the lighting and releasing of the 2,552 commemorative lanterns. I think it is perhaps impolite of me to say that the service was totally boring, but it was. Most of it was delivered in Thai and it took too long to get to the reason 90% of the crowd (of at least three-thousand people) was there – the lighting of the lanterns. I based my estimate on the fact that once the lanterns were lit, most of the crowd queued for the one and only bridge connecting this field to the main road. There was still another 30 minutes of entertainment planned: singing, dancing and traditional Thai puppetry.

I have no doubt that Thailand doesn’t suffer from a crippling fear of lawsuits the way we do in North America because there is no way the release of such lanterns would ever happen at home. The lanterns were actually plastic bags with a hole at the bottom, the edge wrapped around a wire rim. A candle was lit in the middle of the base and it quickly become a bubbling pool of hot liquid (some of which dripped from the sky onto my arm). The build-up of heat caused the bags to inflate and eventually take off. Most of the lanterns sailed high into the sky but the odd few got caught on telephone wires or trees, still alight. All have landed by now, littering the rainforests and the sea and probably setting a few fires in between.