Knee How? The Further Misadventures of a Globe-Trotting Singaporean by Rodney Ee

Author:Rodney Ee [Ee, Rodney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9789814928984
Google: 5Q8gEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cavendish
Published: 2020-01-15T20:34:35+00:00

RAIN RAIN GO AWAY

Every fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year, which coincides with the first full moon of the Lunar New Year, the town of Pingxi in Taiwan hosts a Lantern Festival that draws thousands of merry-makers from all over the country and all around the world. It is a joyful affair, with the origins of the festival dating back to the early 19th century. In those days, farmers in the area would write messages on small hot air paper balloons (also known as Kongming lanterns) and release them at the beginning of the spring planting season, as a vessel carrying their prayers to the gods for a plentiful harvest for that year.

Fast forward to the present, and festival-goers have wholeheartedly embraced this tradition, except that now a plentiful harvest means winning the national lottery. Modern petitions have also been updated to include prayers for good health, passing school exams, and successful plastic surgery operations. The highlights of the celebrations are now waves of co-ordinated mass lantern releases, and if this practice sounds like an aviation hazard, it is. The area around Pingxi is the only place sky lanterns are allowed in Taiwan, as the mountains and water prevent them from flying too far away.

After some procrastination, I decided just a few weeks before the event, to attend this festival together with a good friend of mine. This meant that we were reduced to beggars when it came to finding accommodation close to the event venue. Therefore, I was eternally grateful when he upgraded our planned accommodation from sleeping bags under the stars to a homestay in a village a few stations away from Pingxi village, and he was also able to book a car with a driver for two days.

The rain was pelting the aircraft windows, and the temperature was registering a cool ten degrees Celsius, as we touched down in Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport just before noon. We breezed through immigration, grabbed our belongings, and found our driver without any difficulty. As we slurped on noodles and ate dumplings at a lunch stop near the airport, the rain continued to pour down, but the optimists in us figured the rain would stop by the time we got to the festival site. Besides, there was still more than six hours to the start of the mass lantern releases, which was more than enough time for the clouds to deposit their moisture, wave their goodbyes and drift away.

The first part of the journey to our accommodation was smooth, but as we approached the area, we ran into a few roadblocks. One of the main roads leading to our accommodation was also closed to vehicular traffic. We therefore had to divert to some of the smaller local roads, and reached our accommodation about an hour later than scheduled. By that time, there were still about two hours to go to the mass lantern release, and the rain had weakened to a drizzle, so we felt even more optimistic that it would stop in time for the main event.

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