Loy Krathong and Yi Peng: Thailand's lanterns of light

There's a moment, on the night of the twelfth full moon, when you don't know whether to look up or down. Down at the river, where hundreds of little rafts of folded banana leaf and marigold drift away, each carrying a single trembling candle. Or up at the sky over Chiang Mai, where paper lanterns are rising, one after another, until the dark is freckled with warm light moving slowly toward the stars. I tried to do both at once and nearly walked into the river. That's Loy Krathong and Yi Peng — two festivals of light on the same night, falling on the full moon of the twelfth lunar month, which means the date shifts each year but almost always lands in November.

The river: letting something go

Loy Krathong is celebrated right across Thailand, and it begins with the water. I bought my krathong from a woman who must have folded a thousand of them that week, her fingers tucking banana leaf into neat green points without ever looking down. She showed me how to plant the candle, light the incense, and — this part she mimed rather than explained — to pause before letting it go. Loy Krathong is, at its heart, an act of gratitude to the goddess of water, and a quiet letting-go: you send away the year's bad luck, your small resentments, the things you'd rather not carry into the next twelve months. I crouched at the edge of the Ping River with people pressed in on every side, lit my candle from a stranger's, and set the little raft on the black water. It bobbed, turned, hesitated — and then the current took it, my one flame joining a slow river of hundreds drifting downstream. I won't pretend I had a grand revelation, but I did think of a thing I'd been holding onto, and for a second I let it float off with the candle. That's the whole idea, and it works better than I expected.

« You light one small candle, set it on the water, and watch your year drift away among a thousand others. »

Finding the right spot was its own small adventure, and this is where my phone earned its keep. The authorized release points, the temple grounds with ceremonies, the stretches of riverbank that weren't already shoulder-to-shoulder — I pieced all of it together from maps and local listings on my data as I went. The honest catch: a crowd this dense does something to the network. With tens of thousands of people lining the same river, all filming the same lanterns, my signal slowed to a crawl — messages hung, a map tile took an age to load. Thailand is well outside Europe, so my home plan doesn't roam free here; I'd set up a local eSIM before flying in, which meant I landed already connected and could at least keep trying when the network was choked.

The sky: a thousand quiet flames rising

Then I went north, and the festival changed direction. In Chiang Mai, Yi Peng adds the khom loi to the night — tall paper lanterns you hold closed while the flame underneath fills them with hot air, until they tug at your hands wanting to rise. When you let go, the lantern lifts, wobbles, steadies, and climbs. Multiply that by hundreds of people doing it together and the sky fills with slow, golden light, each flame a wish someone decided to send upward. It is, genuinely, one of the most beautiful things I have ever stood under.

But I have to be honest about the other side of that beauty, because it matters. Those lanterns come down somewhere, still warm; the krathongs end up in the water. The good news is that the tradition is being cared for — krathongs are increasingly made from natural materials like banana trunk, leaves and flowers rather than the polystyrene that used to choke the rivers, and the sky lanterns are now regulated, with real concern about fire risk and aircraft safety. Releases are restricted to designated zones and licensed events rather than launched freely from any street corner. I'm not here to lecture anyone — I floated a krathong and watched lanterns rise myself — but it's worth knowing the magic comes with rules now, and the rules are there for good reasons.

Between river and sky

What undid me a little was the doubleness of it. Loy Krathong sends light downstream and away; Yi Peng sends it upward and out. One is about release, the other about hope, and on the same night, in the same city, you can do both — kneel at the water with a candle, then tilt your head back and let a lantern go. The whole night is a meditation on lightness, in every sense. I stood on a bridge with a paper lantern fading to a pinprick above me and a river of candles slipping away below, and I genuinely could not tell you which direction held more of my attention.

What I take away

Loy Krathong and Yi Peng taught me that letting go and reaching up are the same gesture, just pointed differently. The candle on the water carries away what you'd rather not keep; the lantern in the sky carries up what you're still hoping for. Go for both — float your little raft, release your lantern from a place where it's allowed to fly — and stand for a while on a bridge in between, looking down at the river and up at the stars, letting the whole bright night remind you how light it's possible to feel. Keep your map saved offline, your expectations of the signal gentle, and the rest you can simply release.

— Inès, between the river and the sky, looking both ways.