Fire Balloon festival

I didn’t really keep up on my promise to start up the blog again. . . . . . even sporadically. However, we have now bought a shiny new notebook (with our hard-saved ‘travel’ funds) , so there really is no excuse now. Now it’s nearing the end of January but I haven’t finished discussing Myanmar, way back in October, so here it is, better late than never.

In addition to the trekking which I previously blogged about, the other most treasured memory I have from Myanmar is the Fire Balloon festival. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? And it was. After the 3 day trek from Kalaw to Inle Lake, we were still getting on well as a group , so we spent a couple of days on the vast lake together, cycling around and swanning around on boat. By a stroke of good fortune, it was then time for the festival. The festival itself was about 20 miles away, near a city called Taunggyi. It was a national holiday, public transport had ceased, so we decided to club together and hire a private pick-up to ferry us there and then bring us home. A helpful restaurant owner negotiated for me with the driver which should have been a fairly straightforward affair, had it not been for every man and his dog butting in and offering their 2 pennies worth. Eventually after about 30 minutes of escalating stress, my ‘broker’ managed to secure a fair-ish price for us and write down instructions for the driver. My main concern was the lack of common language between myself and our driver, but no problem said my friend, the driver’s son who can speak English will come along too. Sweet.

2 hours later, we all poured into the back of the pickup and set off. There was quite a merry bunch of us, 3 Brits, 3 Poles and 2 Koreans and a Belgian who we met at the hostel. The driver’s son also joined us in the back and his English was pretty good and we were able to go over the details of the day with him. Spirits were high, especially as we went to a nearby vineyard on the way for a tasting session. Not really the kind of activity you foresee in South-East Asia and this was reflected in the quality of the wine, but it was fun nonetheless. We then went to a restaurant to fuel up before the night’s festivities. The driver also decided to energise, ordering himself a pint of beer. Although most of Asia deems beer to be a on an even keel with water, we were going to be leaving our driver unattended at the biggest festival of the Burmese calendar (for anyone who has never been to a ‘religious’ festival in Asia, Buddha generally rates as a secondary concern to getting tanked out of your head) and he had already started. How was he going to be when we emerged from the festival sometime after midnight? Of course, we couldn’t let a minor concern like this curtail our own personal enjoyment and we vaguely hoped that his son might be able to reign him in.

The festival was situated in a natural bowl on top of a hill, stalls and tents spread out as far as the eye could see, rickety funfair rides and a huge open field in the centre, in which the fire balloons would launch from at nighttime. Every single stall there appeared to contain enough booze to sink a large ship and there were hundreds of stalls. Almost outnumbering the booze stalls, were the gambling tents, featuring punts on everything from skittles and hoopla to pontoon and craps. My personal favourite had to be the roulette podium that was smashing out The Vengaboys “Boom Boom (I want you in my room)” a person of dubious gender MCing, drum and bass style over the top. Nice. After joining with locals and generally losing at most of the games, we decided to clamber aboard the extremely dodgy looking ferris wheel. 4 of us piled into one tiny cart and we began to climb higher and higher,the cage creaking ominously the higher we rose. When we reached the top, the uber-cool youths who operated the contraption, inexplicably began climbing up the sides, even racing each other until they reached the top, where they greeted our dropped jaws with triumphant grins. Before we had recovered from this shock, they swung (and I do mean swung, monkey style across the wooden beams) to the one side of the wheel where they paused, their combined weight pulling the wheel down and thus powering the machine. We were amazed to see a ferris wheel powered in such a way, the agile gibbon-esque teens adding to the overall excitement, hanging upside down and generally trying to out-do each other. They really reminded me of the fearless Lost Boys from the eponymous film, the way they effortlessly leapt around having the time of their lives.

After this excitement it was finally time for the main event, the Fire Balloons themselves. In the central field, gigantic hot-air balloons were being “blown-up” by a huge burning torch, with hundreds of people around the perimeter and many more actually inside right amongst the balloons themselves.. As the balloon started the rise, people clamored around with burning candles which they attached to the exterior of the balloon. It was a fine balance, creating enough gas inside the balloon to make it rise, but not too much so the people could frantically finish their task of decorating the balloon. After 10 minutes or so of this delicate operation the balloon was finally ready, taking off into the sky, the candles illustrating a burning image of Buddha. As the balloon soared, the crowd roared and danced around whilst others bashed away on big drums. Some of the lit candles became loose and plummeted back into the crowd, nobody seemed to mind this just added to the excitement and people cheered harder. It was an intoxicating atmosphere and we planned to get fully amongst the main crowd for the next take-off and flout our British Health and Safety consciences!

We needed to stock up on whiskey to stave off the biting cold and we decided to make a quick check on our driver. We found our pick-up easy enough, however, the driver was nowhere to be seen, instead his teenage son was canoodling in the back with a young lady! We had to ruin the moment and ask where his Dad was to which was just got blank looks and excuses. Hmm, no time to worry now, we needed to get back to the balloons. The next one was just as spectacular, except this time, a basket loaded with fireworks was attached the bottom, which ignited in mid-air, emitting the usual array of flashes and crashes, but this time with a glorious burning balloon in the sky for company. The crowd was becoming more and more drunk, teenage boys and men alike could hardly keep on their feet as the afternoons drinking began to take its toll. There were still groups of boys dancing, chanting and banging away, keeping the party atmosphere going though and there were still plenty more balloons to go. I think by this time the people responsible for the balloons, students from the local university had also over-indulged in the revelry, as each balloon after had a hard job getting off the ground. When the next one eventually got off the ground, it appeared to pause mid-air before it began to fall back to Earth. It was like something from a disaster film, this huge burning ball crashing back down into a packed crowd, with people fleeing in every direction. Or I should say that’s how it felt to us panicked foreigners, the locals either just stood calmly smiling or cheering harder at the sheer chaos of it all. When the balloon hit the floor the whole thing became engulfed in flames and then the wind whipped it back into the air, where it crashed into some huge tents, catching the entire shelter on fire. I don’t think anyone was hurt. It was complete madness, definitely something you would not see back home. The next balloon was also a mental episode as well, this one was also laden with explosives, which someone had lit far too early, meaning the fireworks starting going off when the balloon was only about 2 metres in the air! Us Johnny foreigners sprinted to take cover with our hands over our heads like we were back in the Blitz, whilst the locals just enjoyed the spectacle (laughing at us, mainly).

After a couple more similar occurrences, the whiskey was no longer keeping out the cold, so we decided to call it a night and attempt to go home, subject to driver sobriety of course. When we got there he was nowhere to be seen still. The amorous older son was nowhere to be seen either, just his 8 year old brother holding the fort. Although the boy couldn’t speak English, a helpful student acted as interpreter, asking him where his Dad was. The boy said nothing, just made a drinking action with his hand. We were understandably pretty pissed off by this, although it was holiday time for the Burmese we were paying this guy a fair whack by local standards and we wanted to get back to the guesthouse. The boy scarpered to try and find his Dad, whilst we debated what to do. We decided to hold jury until we saw him, we held out hope that maybe he was just having a shandy or something. Ten minutes later and our misplaced optimism was smashed as he reappeared, drunkenly stumbling into the side of the pick-up. Some of us got angry, some people went to try and find another way of getting home, whilst our teenage interpreter gave the older man a ticking off. Although we couldn’t understand Burmese, slurring is international as our now ex-driver attempted to plead with the boy for us to wait 2 hours whilst he drunk water, had a kip for 2 hours then he’d be right as rain to drive us back! Sorry mate, no thanks. We’d already to pay half up front, so he got a good pay day AND a party so he did pretty well overall. We were in a bit of a pickle though as there were no other taxis which weren’t already booked up, so we began stopping other pick-ups leaving and asking them to help us out. By a stroke of luck the very first guy we spoke to had great English and said we could all jump in and he would take us to town, where we could try and get a taxi back home. What are the chances? The bloke was a real star and even negotiated a fair price from the taxi drivers at 1am on a national holiday. We actually managed to get home for less than we payed our original guy! A memorable evening.