During the Vegetarian Festival, each of Phuket City's several shrines mounts a parade into downtown, and the prime weekend days are reserved for the two biggest. Duk and I had intended to arrive at the Bang Neow parade much earlier, but we caught some exciting moments at the tail end.

Though the Samkong shrine's parade two days earlier had plenty of firecrackers, the insane din from firecrackers during this parade was a couple orders of magnitude heavier. It was painful to walk up the street to get a look at what was going on. Young men carrying the sedan chairs for the Chinese gods were revelling in firecrackers, setting off huge strings of them in the middle of one street and making a public show of withstanding the noise and many small burns on their bare torsos from flaming shreds of firecracker paper flying around. When we came across them, most were covered in spent gunpowder, looking a bit like they had just come off a battlefield. When they had set off all their fireworks, many of them posed for a group picture in the middle of the street.

As we left, we saw a couple more scenes parade by -- much more sedate. A non-exploding group of young men passed by carrying what must be the last of the sedan chairs. And one more maa song tonguing a huge saw.