Koh Phangan

Malaysia was nice and all, but being a Muslim country its not the best night out for a backpacker so after about 2 1/2 weeks in Singapore and Malaysia I was gagging for a party...Koh Phangan was welcome relief!

So after I got off the ferry after an eleven hour journey from Penang which, except for the tedious border checks I mostly slept through, and met Andy at the hostel. Now, Andy hasn't had the best of luck with illnesses over the course of the trip, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if he's had one in every country we've visited so far! It's usually been toncillitis with the exception of his gammy infected toe in Australia, but this time he had a stomach bug so things weren't looking good for the full moon I had been looking forward to so very much.

Things turned out okay in the end though... over the course of the next few days a load of really cool people moved into the dorm including a few boys from guess where... Finchley!!! Wheeeey! Never seen them around but they were just starting uni so they're a few years my junior. There were also two more English girls who turned out to be a good laugh, a texan guy who was slightly odd but added a bit of variety, a trio of French Canadians who didn't speak the best English but were nice enough, a guy who slept in the bunk on top of me who slept and said absolutely nothing at all (why are you in Haad Rin?) and an Irish girl who had burst her ear drum diving so had to go home.

I felt a bit bad for the Irish girl missing the full moon and that, I mean, you don't really think about how you can easily get injured here and your whole trips fucked up. However, its a good job we got chatting to her because it soon makes you think twice about jumping through the burning hoops and skipping rope on the beach at the pre-parties and full moon itself!

Basically, give a couple of Thai guys a rope/ring covered in petrol and suspend above an eager circle of intoxicated holidaymakers having too much of a good time and you get a recipe for disaster -Good fun to watch mind! Its amazing seeing how many people have burns all over their body when you walk around Haad-Rin during the build-up parties and after the full moon. I was not tempted in any way after seeing some of the injuries. We saw one guy -a typical Brit-abroad type- try to skip the skipping rope but the twat failed to time himself right and got a burning rope to the face! Now these ropes are covered in burning hot oil so if that gets in your eyes my guess is that you are blind! Anyway he gets up and swaggers over to his mates, arms in the air and laughing as you would to save face. We felt a bit bad for him when we saw him later, crying as a nurse puts cream on his face!

Also heard a quality story about a bloke who someone knew who decided to get a tattoo when he was pissed. You see a lot of people getting them (Haad-Rin's a bit like LA in that every other shop is a tattoo parlour), and some of them look alright, but this bloke apparently asked for 'Let the good times roll' and got instead 'let the good timns roll'...ha, gutted!

I didn't have the best luck in Haad-Rin either. I managed to get caught by a Thai security guard doing something I shouldn't have been and got sat down and rewarded with a few solid slaps around the face which at the time didn't hurt so much, but the next day I could barely chew. All good now mind, and after watching the Muay Thai there I'll take a few slaps to avoid a beating!
Two really cool places In Haad-Rin aside from the beach are Coral Bungalows and Magic Mountain. Magic mountain is a bar which serves a certain fungus...'nuff said. Coral Bungalow has pool parties which are cool to go to before the beach. Its a good place to get chatting to people but the water in the pool is somewhat dubious and there's a few stories beginning 'A friend of a friend got Chlamidya in his/her eye here'... That's one illness Andy was very lucky to avoid!

The Full Moon party itself is HUGE! They say its between 12000 and 20000 UV-painted people and it could easily be true. I managed to lose everyone (Andy managed to come out for a fair bit of the night even though he was ill) and soon gave up trying to find them. It's nice how the vibe here is the same as it is at trance raves back home (i'm sure thats for different reasons mind :-)... everyone's up for chatting to eachother. I just got chatting to an Aussie bloke and got pissed with him for a couple of hours until I ran into the others again.

There are two main bars for the preparties and a few others spring up for the party itself. There's a main one which plays commercial remixes -some good, some bad (hard-house Justin Beiber?), and there's enother one called Zoom which plays wicked psytrance and gets a really mental crowd!

There's a funky mix of people as well. You get you're backpackers on trips of varying lengths but in generally the same mindset, a sprinkling of hippies and people who have dabbled with far too many drugs in their time, and then you get quite few people who are just there for a couple of weeks to get pissed. I mean fair do's were all here for that, but it would be a shame for Koh Phangan to become another Magaluf.

Think thats a good point to stop at.
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