Flower Festival in Chiang Mai

The 1st weekend in February, Chiang Mai hosts a Flower Festival near the Southwest corner of the moat. A parade winds through the old town, but instead of waking up early and trying to track it down, we decided to simply meet it at the end near the family park in the Southwest corner. This is where all of the street vendors set up their stands—including food, clothing, and flowers!

The prices seemed to be reasonable. This sign her indicates this plant is just 10 Baht (30 cents)!

We saw only a few floats go by, as we were busy socializing with another traveling family we had arranged to meet for the first time at the park. I’m not sure if it’s just because we were at the end…but there seemed to be no rhyme and reason to when the floats went by and where the went….it was definitely not a constant flow of floats.

However, we were very impressed by the few amazing floral floats that we did see! Every inch of these floats were covered in real flowers!!

We hadn’t seen anything this colorful since enjoying Semana Santa in Guatemala in April 2012 (where the Guatemalans make “carpets” out of flowers and colored sawdust in the streets). This was such a treat for the eyes!

Look at the detail!

The stars of the show at the Chiang Mai Flower Festival are clearly the floats—so be sure to prioritize seeing them, as the street vendors are less impressive than a typical street market. I wish we would have seen more floats, but I was satisfied with the small handful we did get to see stroll on by!  We were out of there by noon…so it was only a half day adventure in the heat with the kids!