Koh Phangan and the Full Moon Party 07/10

We were a little nervous landing in Koh Phangan, as I had tried to book one night in a hotel there for the night of the Full Moon Party, but all the rooms online required at least three or four days of stay. Apparently this party lasts for a few days before the actual night of the full moon, which is the night of the big party. We had to go back to Bangkok the next day, so we couldn’t stay. Luckily, when the ship docked, there were guys out there ready for travelers like us and we were offered a great little bungalow on the beach for cheap. It was very cute and the restaurant/lobby had a beautiful view. It was a nice place to come and go from, and we were both glad to have found a place instead of having to bring all our junk to the party and watching over it like we were afraid we might have to.













Our room even came equipped with our very own bathroom toad. The bathroom wasn’t very clean, so I sprayed the whole thing down with the shower nozzle. Great idea, but I didn’t realize that an ant colony resided in the wall near the sink. After the spray-down, the ants swarmed out and up the wall to safety. There were thousands! And our lovely toad, which we named Fernando (and then could not get that song out of our heads), apparently wasn’t hungry enough to eat them. Dang. I’m getting better about my ant phobia and I don’t freak out too much when I see them (as long as they aren’t on me), but I do still get plenty of dreams that ants are crawling all over my bed even after leaving Thailand.


The Full Moon Party was nuts of course. There were drunk people everywhere and many people were body-painted in brightly colored black light reactive paints. We missed the memo on that one. We got in and busied ourselves with drinking a bucket cocktail. I mean they sell you a little bucket with ice, a can of coke, a can of Red Bull, and a flask-sized bottle of booze. That was a bit hard to get down at first! Right when we got onto the beach we were greeted by some friendly, drunk Frenchmen who seemed to think we could speak French. One of them kissed us both on the cheeks and his friend guided him away. The night was full of very silly encounters like that. All the bars on the beach were opened up and full of people dancing to crappy, loud house music. And each bar was competing with the next to be the loudest. Not the best sounding dance party I’ve been to. One bar had this tall, crazy slide on the side. You had to climb up a rope ladder to a platform and make sure the bottom was totally clear before you went down (or you would hurt yourself or others, which one girl we saw did). Oh and on the way down, you had to keep your hands to yourself because you went through a flaming hoop at the bottom! We even ran into an Austrian traveler we’d met on Koh Tao. Thailand really is a small place when you stick to the touristy areas. We saw many of the same people in different tourist locations during our trip.





We took a taxi truck home that night. They are pickups with seats lining the bed of the truck and they fit probably ten people total inside. It’s nice to get one that’s covered, especially since it was raining most of that night. I’m sure those drivers bank on party nights. In fact the entire island probably thrives off of it. We got home and slept only a few hours until we had to get up, check out, and get on a boat back to the mainland. Chelsea had a jammed toe from a badly placed rock in the ground, both of us had cuts on our feet from shells on the beach, and I was still nursing scraped feet from my volleyball game. We were tired, hungover, and in generally rough shape heading home! But we had a fabulous time in Thailand and are already talking about the next place in the world we want to meet up and travel around in. I’m thinking somewhere in South America. Onward ho!