We got ourselves to Chiang Mai to be present for the peak of their lantern festival, which was a brilliant decision.
At this festival people buy paper lanterns, light some sort of fuel at the bottom, and let them fly away as hot air balloons. All of the schools in Chiang Mai had students out selling lanterns for fundraising so we bought a few and sent them off ourselves.
The sky was completely full of lanterns flying away and the river was covered in small rafts of flowers that people would set on fire and place in the water. On one of our nights there we ate a fancy dinner by the water and watched the lanterns and the boats.
(Pics: all of the dots in the sky are lanterns; all of the dots on the river are rafts.)
Since anybody and everybody could send lanterns off, there were many failed launches. If you didn't wait long enough before releasing the lantern it would not ride enough, and would instead drift over the crowd, on fire, and start sinking toward people. We learned to avoid those lanterns by ducking whenever we heard a lot of screaming behind us.
Another failure mode was to hold on for too long, usually when people were trying to take too many photos. The lanterns would start to smoke and eventually catch fire in people's hands.
Somewhere in Thailand is a stranger with a photo of me posing with her friend in front of the remainder of her lantern, giving a giant thumbs up. This was a worthwhile photobomb in my opinion.
To add another later of fire and smoke to the festivities, there were fireworks for sale. Most were small, but there were quite a few that were large enough to be in a real fireworks show back home. All of them were being launched by people in the streets and on the bridges. There were also special lanterns with sparklers attached to them that looked like rockets as they rose. Darren tried to get some awesome fireworks and ended up with a stick that crackled for a while and then sent of tiny clouds of sparks with a very defeated popping noise. His other fireworks failed to launch, and his face when realizing this was priceless.
(Pics: Big fireworks; Darren and his fireworks; more lanterns; modern lanterns with no fire and no explosions.)
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