When we decided to move to Asia I knew one thing I wanted to experience was a lantern festival. What I didn’t know was that Taiwan has an iconic one! The Pingxi Lantern Festival. You can imagine how excited I was when I found out. I marked it down in my calendar months in advance and set up monthly reminders on my computer to be extra sure I wouldn’t forget!
what, When & where:
Pingxi is a super quaint mountain town with an old railroad running through it. This village’s 
connection to sky lanterns goes back almost 200 years. Back then the lanterns were used to signal safety; now they are symbols of hope. It’s possible to buy and send a lantern into the sky any day you visit Pingxi. But it is on first full moon of the Lunar New Year each year that tens of thousands of glowing lanterns float into the sky in mass. And that is a sight to behold!
An extra layer of beauty is added to the sight when you realize that most of the lanterns have hand written words and messages of hope for the New Year. Whole families take time writing out their wishes ( complete with the occasional cute children’s drawings). I loved walking around and seeing all the different languages scrawled across the lanterns, expressing hope (and humor) for the new year.
something to consider
I have to acknowledge one bit of rain on my parade concerning this festival. Soooo many lanterns released into the sky, that eventually fall and litter the countryside….oh right…harms nature. After all, the metal pieces and cloth obviously are not super biodegradable.(Although Taiwan is putting money into trying to create biodegradable lanterns so the festival can continue without harmful impact on the environment)
Josh and I didn’t light our own lantern when we went. Our reason was partly because of the environment issue and mostly because we didn’t get there in time to register for a space in the mass release. 😛 But I’m so enchanted with this idea of writing wishes for the year onto a lantern and releasing it into the sky that I hope we’ll go back and do it. BUT for our part we’ve decided that IF we do that then we’ll also commit to going out and retrieving some. (Pingxi has great hiking and a beautiful waterfall we plan to explore – quite possibly with a garbage bag in tow! ) Being an expat and a tourist to other countries provides plenty of moments to wrestle with these kinds of questions – how our presence and participation in the country positively or negatively impacts that place…
Travel Note: If you’re interested in going to next year’s event, I’ll provide some logistics bellow. (Or I will soon… there’s a whole year between now and when you might need them) !
Meanwhile you can read more here:
~National Geogrpahic (Did I mention it made Nat’l Geographic’s top 10 winter trips in 2016!)