Teenage escorts and Loy Krathong

Another full moon, another festival. Travis and I have a history of spending foreign holidays in small towns, so we opted to leave crowded MaeHongSon and travel further South to MaeSariang, a town completely unmentioned in our guidebook. We arrived the afternoon of the festival and after wandering the wide, dusty roads for over an hour we found little that indicated a major party would soon be under way.

In select hair salons women were being made up, their hair piled elegantly atop their heads and decorated with fresh orchids. A huge stage and sound system was being mounted, of all places, at the police headquaters. A dozen or so women could be seen sitting outside their houses folding banana leaves into floating altars, and movable food stalls were setting up on a side road near the river. But for the most part, things were very quiet. Had we not seen 2 parade floats hauled uphill by a pickup truck we may have assumed the festivals was in fact not being celebrated. We went back to our guesthouse to talk to the owner and find out just what we might expect for the evening.
There we met a nice couple from Quebec and we drank beers with them until the guesthouse owner told us it was time for the parade. In the 2 hours since we'd left the city center a total transformation had occurred! The sun had set, the streets were packed, music was intermittenly blaring from each passing parade float.

The floats looked more or less the same- sparkley, whitish, dragonlike, with a beautiful women perched on top smiling stiffly. Accompanying each float was a man holding a long bammboo stick with a "y" at the top who would raise the low-slung power cables and allow the float to pass without damaging the local electric supply. Hilltribe groups wearing traditional dress marched in loose formation carrying laterns, and local students wore golden costumes and performed dances. In between every float the crowd of bystanders would pour into the center of the street to see what was coming next. As the new attraction approached, the sea of people would part to again make way.
Midway during the parade we lost the Quebecans so I set out to find them. On my way back to Travis, I cut through a restaurant to avoid the crowd and there a group of teenagers pulled up a seat and asked me to sit with them (mostly using hand gestures). Flattered, I accepted. At the table, I had a hard time communicating with my new friends, but I think they understood that I was an English teacher in Korea and I think I understood that they were 19, going to university in ChaingMai and loved hardcore music, especially Slipknot and Korn. One boy had slightly long hair which he affectionately referred to as his "afro". Both boys were weaing oversized black t-shirts advertising the names of bands I'm not familiar with and wore long silver chains dangling with gaudy, plastic and metal Buddhist pendants. The girl had on heavy make up and a fake leopard fur hoodie. All three had impeccable manners and kept refilling my beer and adding ice to the glass as they chattered to each other and sent text messages on their cell phones.
When the parade ended I was still at the restaurant, so I tried to excuse myself to go find Travis. The boys, eager to show me the lanterns on the river, followed. Luckily, Travis is easy to find in a crowd of Asians. Once reunited, our new friends- who of course thought Travis' beard was awesome and kept touching it and comparing him to some member Korn- bought us banana leaf altars and showed us how to put them in the water. Unlike in Laos, where in order to get your altar in the water you had to either pay a young boy to swim into the river for you or wade into 1foot depths of mud along the riverbank yourself, in MaeSariang a little dock had been constructed for the altar send offs. The dock was full of people lighting candles and gently placing their banana boats in the water. Along the riverbank folks were shooting off fireworks and sending miniature hot air balloons into the sky. Loud, thumping music was bouncing from the police station, and you could smell the roasted meat from the food carts.

Our friends took us to a beer garden where we proceeded to drink pitchers of beer, each time cheersing with a hearty rolled R "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroy!" in honor of the Roy Krathong festival. We met more happy teenagers who offered us spicy food we could barely eat, and who bowed and smiled and seemed to enjoy our being around though we couldn't communicate much. Finally when our heads were pounding from the music and the drinking and we felt we had almost repaid our friends by buying them and the next table over sufficient rounds of pitchers, we tried to make a polite escape from the party. We were nearly out of the town center and just 100 meters away from our guesthouse when the boys found us and insisted we light off fireworks, which we did. Then they escorted us on their motorbikes the remaining distance back to our home and gave us each one of their pendants.