Loy Kratong Festival 2008, Isaan Thailand.

On the 12th of November we celebrated Loy Kratong. I wrote a more in depth report on what Loy Kratong is and some of the meanings to the Kratongs last year and you can read about it all here. You can also see a picture of Noot’s younger sister Ben who won the Miss Noppamus Beauty Pageant. Noot won this same contest two years early.

We first ventured to the Moon River to see what was happening there. It wasn’t too crowded, but there were still plenty of people about.

It is very popular to release hot air lanterns or known as “Kome Loy”. Here people have lit the small oil burner under the lantern.

Here a mum and her son are waiting for enough hot air to fill the lantern and then carry it up into the night sky.

You will need to click on this image to see the large size picture, and then you will see tiny little lights in the pitch black sky from the lanterns.

I lucked in here as a lantern floated past the full moon.

We then headed to Rajabhat Univesity. Last year we ventured over to the large lake called Hua Wang Nong, but this was insanely busy and took us 40 minutes to go about 500 metres as we were stuck in traffic. Rajabhat is busy enough. This is a 4 lane road that has been turned into one because of all the motorbikes parked out the front. You can see these cars that are parked in as they are surrounded by motorbikes. I hope the people didn’t want to leave early.

Noot was a little hungry, so she stopped for some processed meat sticks.

This is yummy sweet potato, bananas and sticky rice. This is all very nice on a cool Isaan night.

Here an array of processed meats on a stick.

I am a huge fan for this, sticky rice dipped in an egg batter. It isn’t good for your waistline but when it is cool and the rice is hot you cannot help but eat it.

These are salipow or like a dumpling with variety of fillings. Some of the fillings are really weird, I mean, really weird.

These are like a hotdog and also very delicious. I forgot how many of them you get for 30 baht. They were very nice so I fitted them into my very full stomach.

That is a small part of the night and I will upload all the pictures and the other part of the night over the next few days, time permitting.

Brunty