Tha Pae Gate
With the excitement for the New Year only minutes away, crowds filled Tha Pae Gate in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Families, friends and strangers gathered with their lanterns to watch the sky light up. Even before midnight, lanterns were already beginning to light the Thai night.
It can get very crowded in certain areas so finding a spot early and staying there is key!
Lanterns
Many people were selling lanterns ranging from 50-100 baht depending on the size of the lantern.
A couple of unlucky lanterns were seen in trees until they burnt out. You could hear the crowd sigh when a lantern got stuck in a tree but when the lantern dodged it everyone would cheer and clap.
It became a mini show of dancing flickering lights in the sky, watching to see which ones would make it out smoothly.
Setting Your Intentions
Villn and I wrote our intentions for a fruitful new year and set our lantern off to drift into the infinite. We were secretly crossing out fingers that ours wouldn’t get caught in a tree or come crashing down on someone. To our luck, with strong energy, it gracefully and beautifully rose up up and away.
I lit another bigger lantern with my friends, and success! It confidently flew up into the sky as well.
NEW YEAR’S IN CHIANG MAI!
At the stroke of midnight, majority of the lanterns were set free. What a beautiful and unique sight! Truly a magical moment to witness all the lights slowly soaring up to the heavens.
Fireworks went off and it was officially 2018! We were able to let go of the things that no longer served us and make room for all that awesomeness that awaits this new year. Celebrating New Year’s in Chiang Mai was a pretty epic way to begin the New Year!
Staying Connected
It was awesome staying connected with family and friends back in California during our trip to Chiang Mai, Koh Samui and Koh Phangan, Thailand.
We used ThaiSims pocket wifi, which allows you to stay connect to the internet and take it with you wherever you go. This light weight pocket wifi is specific to Thailand and can connect up to 8 devices.
We had it sent to our hotel and mailed it back at the airport when we were leaving.
Even on the islands we were able to send and receive emails, What’s App messages and be on social media whenever we wanted.
Bonus! When you use ThaiSims they send you a cute little elephant bag. It was handy to put our baht in during our trip.
They also include the return package with stamps already on it but we had to add an extra 10 baht at the post office.
Compared to TEP wireless which is another brand pocket wifi that I have used when traveling in Mexico, Japan and Europe, Thai Sims was more reliable and cheaper. The wifi on TEP wireless would sometimes stop working and getting it to connect again was a bit of a hassle. I did not have this problem with ThaiSims.
Overall we had a great experience with ThaiSims and would highly recommend it to anyone traveling to Thailand.
Need suggestions on other things to do in Thailand? Check out Elephants World and Maya Sleep Aboard for more information.
Thanks for reading!
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