Taunggyi Balloon Festival

ေတာင္ၾကီးမီးပံုးပ်ံပြဲ ??❤️☺️

(English Below)

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္အလည္တစ္ေခါက္ေရာက္ခဲ႔ရာက ခ်စ္စရာရွမ္းဓေလ႔၊ ေဖာ္ေရြပ်ဴငွာလွတဲ႔ ေတာင္ေပၚသူေတာင္ေပၚသားေတြ၊ အရသာေကာင္းလြန္းတဲ႔ ရွမ္းအစားအစာေတြကို မေမ႔နိုင္ သတိေတြရေနဆဲပါ။ ေတာင္ၾကီးမီးပံုးပ်ံပြဲကိုလည္း မထင္မွတ္ပဲ ၾကံဳၾကိဳက္ခဲ႔ေသးတာမို႔ ေန႔ဘက္အရုပ္မီးပံုပ်ံေတြ၊ ညဘက္မီးပံုးပ်ံၾကီးေတြကို တအံ႔တၾသေငးေမာၾကည္႔ခဲ႔ရတဲ႔ သိပ္ကိုလွပလြန္းတဲ႔ေန႔ညေတြျဖစ္ခဲ႔ပါတယ္။ သြားလည္မယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာ႔ အေႏြးထည္ေလးေတြယူသြားၾကဖို႔နဲ႔ အနီးကပ္သြားမၾကည္႔ဘဲ ခပ္ခြာခြာကေနသာၾကည္႔ၾကဖို႔ မွာပါရေစရွင္။ နွစ္စဥ္နွစ္တိုင္း ျခိမ္႔ျခိမ္႔သဲက်င္းပေလ႔ရိွတဲ႔ ေတာင္ၾကီးမီးပံုပ်ံပြဲကို အေရာက္သြားရင္း ရွမ္းအိုးစည္သံေတြၾကားမွာ ေမ႔ေမာကာ ရွမ္းရိုးရာ ဓေလ႔ေတြကိုခ်စ္မိသြားမွာ အမွန္ပါ။

Taunggyi balloon festival is happening now (26th October to 3rd November, 2017).
(Taunggyi is a capital city of Shan State, Myanmar)

I was just lucky to know that, when I was in Inle on 27th October. I was at the right place at the right time to experience this display of beautiful huge balloons, Taunggyi Balloon Festival. The festival continues day and night for these days.

Me and my travel partner rushed to Taunggyi from Inle with a hired Taxi to attend the night time hot air balloon competition. There was a big crowd, many long queues of food stalls and some fun rides.

Many groups of youngsters were coming to the festival ground for competing, loaded in open vans while performing their traditional music and dance. Just looking at their energetic mood, the dance and movement, made us happy and feeling festive.

Groups were coming one after another to set up their huge balloons which were decorated with lights and beautiful paintings on top. We watched them from a distance to get a better view and to avoid standing in the crowd. Watching these amazingly beautiful hot air balloons flying in the sky and showering colorful fireworks was an unforgettable moment in my life.

During the night, mostly big hot air balloons are attached with fireworks which turn them into stunning beauty in the dark sky. The falling debris of the fire balloons are dangerous and often cause fire nearby.

My very first hot air balloon watching was totally wonderful and I couldn’t stop smiling as I was very happy. The best part of this festival was that when a fire balloon would go up successfully, the people would start by dancing and singing energetically to celebrate their success. It was as if they had passed their 15 min exam for which they had been preparing for past 3 months.

Their happiness was infectious!

Night time hot air balloons with fireworks continued one by one till early morning. Watching this great event was totally worth spending my night there.

We got back to our hotel at Inle after midnight and planned to watch the next day time competition as well.

During the day, it was like a fun fair ground for the kids and families. Day time hot air balloons didn’t contain fireworks but were more colorful and were of more interesting shapes (eg. Elephant, Birds, cows, etc.). It was the pleasure to see the delight on kids’ faces while watching the beautiful and colorful balloons rising towards the sky.

The Taunggyi Hot Air Balloon festival is held to celebrate the full moon day, starting every year around the end of October till the beginning of November. The balloons are released as an offering to Buddha. Villages, tribes and families from the nearby cities and areas participate in this festival to display their balloons and to enjoy the day and night fair. Nowadays this festival is becoming very famous and flooded with people from various parts of Myanmar and with foreigners. It is a must visit event if one is travelling to Myanmar during these days.

Tips
– Suggested to wear warm clothes as it air gets a little cold during the night festivities in Taunggyi.
– Advised to watch from a distance for your own safety.

Stay safe and be happy. ❤️??

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