A sky lantern ( or I want one ;-)

not my picture

Cycling through Stanley Park to English Bay tonight, I was stopped dead in my tracks by something I saw at the beach.  It looked something like this:



At first I thought it was some kind of kite, but as the unidentified flying object drifted further and further out over English Bay and at the same time gained altitude at an alarming rate, it dawned on me that the object was designed for and sent on a one time mission.

not my picture

My eyes followed its path for quite a while, and at some point I would have guessed that it was a a high flying plane if I hadn't followed it from its start.







These babies are apparently known as Kongming or Chinese lanterns and are used in VAST numbers in Thailand's Yi Peng festival, which should be somewhere around this time of year, if I read the Wikipedia article correctly.  But instead of the one lantern I witnessed, there are LOTS of them, as this picture shows that I pilfered from the Wikipedia article.

NOT my picture (unfortunately ;-)