After our post on surviving the holidays as an expat, I decided to spend some time on a related topic. Let’s talk about how to survive Chinese New Year, or the Lunar New Year, as a tourist. Imagine a national holiday in your own country where everyone gets at least one day of paid vacation. Now imagine that approximately 1.5 billion people get to celebrate that holiday with you. Stretch the holiday into roughly a week, and you have an idea of how important a holiday it is.
In other words, for those that aren’t already into celebrating the first day of the Lunar Year, think of it as Labor day, New Year’s Eve and Thanksgiving all rolled into one big holiday. That will give you a basic scope of what this important time of year is like. It is big family holiday, with lots of history and traditions. We’re not going to get into that here. Instead, we want to take some time to help people who don’t normally celebrate Chinese New Year to navigate the holiday.
The dates for Chinese New Year change
Chinese New Year basically falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice. So it is calculated using the cycle of the moon, and the position of Earth around the sun. That means that you have to find a Chinese New Year calendar to know what day new year’s day is. But you also have to pay attention to the day of the week. In 2020, CNY day is on a Saturday, the 25th of January. Most everyone starts celebrating the night before, New Year’s Eve. Many countries also have Thursday and Friday off and the holiday will really get started on Friday, January 24. If you are considering travelling in China, Korea, Taiwan, or anyplace that observes CNY or Lunar new year, DO NOT make travel plans for those days. If you absolutely must travel over those days, make sure to add a few hours to any line you think you might have to wait in. For anything.
A time for family
There is a set tradition around family meals over the Lunar New Year. Since we don’t have a history of understanding those traditions, we aren’t going to cover them here. What we will talk about is the reunion dinner. This is the dinner where family members travel long distances to share a meal with the entire extended family. It happens on New Year’s Eve, and it is considered to be the most important meal of the year by billions of people. Traditionally, everyone would go to their ancestral home to share a home cooked meal. Now, it is just as likely that people will rotate households for hosting duties. For many households, instead of spending long hours preparing traditional foods, families will instead celebrate at restaurants. So obviously, hotel rooms and sit-down restaurants are scarce at this time. Other families choose to go on vacation, and that is where our first scenario comes in.
So you want to travel during Chinese New Year
There are plenty of fantastic vacation destinations in southeast Asia that are perfect for a February visit. Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, all offer warm temperature and sun with just a reasonable amount of tropical rain. It’s a great time to go swim or dive in the Andaman sea, or catch a firefly tour after searching for proboscis monkeys in Borneo. With a bloom of low cost carriers offering cheap airfare, getting around and enjoying everything that Asia has to offer at this time of year doesn’t have to break the bank. If you plan ahead, that is.
Our most successful CNY plans for travel have had two vital elements. We book our hotels and flights about six months in advance. Expedia has been a valuable place to start, as they have a good number of listings for full cost and low cost carriers in Asia. There are plenty of other travel consolidators that will give you a good start on what airlines offer connections to different destinations. Just make sure that you check out baggage polices on each carrier’s website. Most airlines also offer a English language version to their site.
The other element is the days that you travel. Since everyone will be trying to travel a day or two before the reunion dinner, if you can offset your flight out and your return by just a few days off, you’ll see a significant price decrease. For us, we have been fortunate to have a job that let us take a few extra vacation days. This last go around, we flew out of Taiwan to Thailand on a low cost carrier, then scheduled our return to Taipei a few days before the end of the holiday on a full cost carrier. The price of the return flight was about the same, but we were able to stuff our check-on bags with the full complement of treasures.
So you came to experience the Lunar New Year
As an expat, the best thing you can do is be adopted into the family celebrations for New Year’s Eve. But there are other great ways to enjoy this fantastic celebration. There are markets set up before the actual celebrations that feature lots of foods, clothes, and decorations. There are fireworks and firecrackers in the streets on New Year’s Eve. But if you are traveling to Taiwan specifically to experience CNY festivities, you might want to wait and come a week or so after actual new years day. That’s because, aside from the big meals, most of the fun really happens during Lantern Festival. In Taiwan, this celebrations starts around the 15th day of the first month of the Lunar New Year. So that’s actually after everyone gets back from their week off of work and school. There are a lot of ways to enjoy the Lantern festival. We did a blog on our trip to Pingxi, whose sky lantern event is certainly on the must-see end of CNY activities.
We also like to take advantage of the Taipei lantern festival, which is an annual street festival of art and performances. Traditionally people carry around hand held lanterns at this beautiful festival. Last year, the Taipei festival had a great night walk that featured electronic light shows and beautiful street art. Local schools also create large scale dioramas that are built out of cloth, wire and lights. If you want to see an even grander more elaborate version of this event, check which city is hosting the national lantern festival that year. (In 2020 it will be in Taichung from Feb. 8 – 23)
Chinese New Year, something for everyone
This time of year is an exciting holiday, full of traditions, food, and fantastic opportunities. Expat or tourist, there are a lot of great ways to enjoy this time of year. With a bit of planning, you can find many ways to really get a lot out of this time of year. Just make sure that you don’t run afoul of the high volume of travel during this amazing time of year.
Of course it’s always a good idea to be aware of the special things each season brings to the area you are traveling or expating in! If you’re curious, here’s our running list of flowers, festivals and other seasonal experiences not to miss in Taiwan.