Sà wàt dii everybody. It’s 10pm (Thailand time) on Wednesday September 17, 2008 and I just got back from an unbelievable day on the ocean. I will get to that in my next update though. So... I was walking back to my room just now and walked right past a huge black snake (I think it was a cobra because it had a fat head?). I freaked out a little when I noticed it and then I just stood there and watched it slither away. God! The one time I let my guard down and I almost step on another snake. I decided to hide in my room and hopefully do a nice write up for you guys so I can avoid some snake wrestling! This post is about my trip with Dave, Alisa and Annie to Koh Pha Ngan, Thailand for the Full Moon Party!
So Friday morning we flew out of Singapore and arrived in Phuket, Thailand around 11 in the morning. From there, we hired a taxi straight from the Airport to the Raja Pier, which was about 3 1/2 hours north. The cab was great actually, a nice little Corolla and a semi-friendly Thai driver. I asked him a few questions about basic Thai greetings and got a couple laughs at my attempt to pronounce them. We passed a lot of awesome rock formations that rose up out of the water and saw plenty of Buddhist temples. When we arrived at the pier, the cab driver pulled over and asked for a "Tip? Tip? Tip for long drive?.” We obliged with an extra 100Baht. The ride was expensive enough (A rough conversion from Baht to Canadian is to divide Baht by 30). After going inside to purchase a ticket to Koh Pha ngan, we found that we were actually at the wrong pier. We had to jump in another cab and drop 300Baht to travel about 5 minutes down the road to the other pier. God I hate being taken advantage of as a tourist. We eventually made it onto a huge ferry and parked ourselves on the top deck.
The ferry ride was pretty typical, even though the ship was ancient and looked like it could fall apart at any time. But that’s just southeast Asia for you! I think I’m starting to get used to terribly inefficient travel. I will never take proper roads, infrastructure or capable vehicles for granted again. The weather was pretty overcast for most of the ride, though I still snapped a bunch of photos and convinced Dave to start our video documentary for the weekend. He did a great job, and as such I have a collection of absolutely hilarious videos to patch together for another post in the future.
4 hours later we almost rolled into the port at Koh Phangan, except that the ferry decided to stop and hang out just outside in the bay. Apparently a large wave from a storm had disrupted the boats before us, so we had to sit there for an extra 45 mins.
We exited into a horde of taxi drivers and somehow luckily found the one lady in the crowd who operated the shuttle straight to our hotel. The hotel was on a beach on the northwest corner of the island, which was actually quite a ways away from where the full moon party was, but it was unbelievable. That night we spent some time getting settled and grabbed some dinner at the restaurant there. I really liked it, mostly because of the cool cushions that we sat on, but I also liked the dinner that night. The free breakfast’s were pretty decent too, but since two of the mornings I was hungover, they never really sat well. I don’t think the others were very pleased with the food though. After dinner we took a quick dip in the pool and I relaxed with a beer. Dave and Alisa and I talked for a while about our possible trips in October and November and then headed to bed.
Saturday morning we got up and I checked out if the wireless worked. I ended up talking to my parents on Skype for a few minutes while sitting on our balcony which was cool! We got breakfast then headed down to the beach to check it out. It was beautiful, obviously. After that we headed out to find mopeds to rent and ride around the island. I had decided previously that the roads were empty enough for us all to be safe on the bikes. However, Annie’s enthusiasm wasn’t enough to help her feel comfortable on the actual machine when we found some. This was fine, since we could double up and that was Alisa’s plan from the start. But in the end, Dave didn’t feel comfortable driving with another person on the back, so we scrapped the idea. We walked down the road a ways and ended up finding a jeep/Suzuki to rent for 800Baht a day. But check this… It wasn’t exactly Westernized. It was old, rusted, power-nothing, no radio, manual AND the stick shift was on the left. Took me a few minutes to figure it out haha, but man that vehicle was fun.
We went into the town by the pier called Thong Sala and did some shopping for souvenirs and grabbed some food for lunch. Lunch was amazing, I am starting to love authentic Thai food even though my face gets on fire. Oh and the Pineapple milkshake was the greatest thing ever invented.
From there we headed to a traditional Thai massage spa/herbal steam sauna run by a monk. Yup. It wasn’t as fancy as it sounds though, haha. The spa was a small house with two mats in it on the ground. And the steam sauna was a tiny, old, moldy hole in the wall that was EXTREMELY hot and awkward. The girls started with a massage while Dave and I hit the sauna. I lasted about 5 minutes in the sauna before feeling like I might pass out from the heat, while Dave lasted even less. How were we going to wait 60 minutes for our turn on the mats? I went back and forth into the room a lot, alternating between cooling off by dunking water on my head or sitting on the steps outside. Oh, I should mention that the monks burn herbs and pump them in with the steam. That was beautiful. The thai massage was ridiculous too. I’ve never had a regular massage back home, but this had to have been totally different. The masseuse pushed into each of my muscles with her hands and stood on my back/legs and cracked my knuckles and my neck and back. Granted, I did feel really loosened up afterwards, except my spine was kind of sore. I might just go for a regular shoulder massage next time haha.
After our intense relaxation, we hopped into the matt-mobile and drove to the middle of the island to find some waterfalls that were on our map. After parking, we walked about 200m to the ‘falls’ only to find a lot of large rocks and a small stream trickling down. I guess there hasn’t been enough rain lately to warrant waterfalls. Anyways, it started to get dark super fast so I told the girls to head back to the car while I tried to snap some cool low-light photos. In only about 5 minutes it went from dusk to dark, and Dave and I had to tread our way through the rainforest back to the car.
After this we headed back home, grabbed some dinner and relaxed in our hammocks before deciding to have some drinks and catch the 11 o clock taxi from our hotel down to Haad Rin Beach for the Full Moon Party pre-party. The ride there was kind of weird. We got into a nice van with a bunch of other people and we asked if the driver had any music to put on. He handed me three cd’s and the remote control to the deck. I turned to the rest of the vanbus and mentioned that we only have ‘The best of The Eagles, and two other cd’s that I can’t understand.’ Eagles it was, and we all ended up almost passing out on the 40 minute ride since it was so relaxing haha.
Anyways, let me paint you a picture of the beach. First of all, it’s huge. There was quite a bit of room to move around on the first night and it was easy to find a spot on the beach to sit down and drink. There are bars lined up along the edge of the beach, each playing their own type of music that was, for the most part, a mix of electro-techno-trance-drum and bass and hip-hop. Although, at one point during the FMP, I caught some Grease tunes. In between each of the bars there were independently run bucket shops. That is, buckets of liquor. My favorite was one called “Peter and Jenny” because Peter was a really nice guy. He ended up giving me a free bucket and a lot of extra liquor because I kept coming back to him, which is exactly what they go for. Anyways, I think my favorite was a Pineapple juice/red bull/vodka mixture bucket. They were so deadly though, because they went down so easy. There were some other awesome names like “I love you long time” and “Good F**k Buckets.” Lets see, along the beach there was some good entertainment too. The first night we had some fire swingers and a limbo bar that was lit on fire. Second night there were guys with other fire instruments and also a huge jump rope that anyone could go and try to hop over. Oh, that was on fire as well. I don’t think anyone who tried got past one hop. Throughout the night you would see people hooking up all along the beach too, which was ridiculous. Oh and probably the weirdest thing I saw the whole night had to be this one sexy girl running around with her top off and carrying a huge whip. A crowd of guys had gathered around her and she decided to chase them around while smashing them with her whip. Like…what!?! We saw a couple iguanas and got our picture with them.
I guess I am jumping ahead a bit, since some of this happened at the actual FMP on Sun night, but it all kind of blurs together for me. Saturday night we didn’t leave the beach until about 6am, and by the time our taxi made it to our hotel the sun had come up and I had passed out hard. Annie had her purse stolen at the party and lost her money and cell phone, and my phone went missing at some point during the night as well. What a bunch of crap, but I guess we had been warned by plenty of people!
The next morning was pretty rough since we decided to get up early and make something of our day. We hopped into the jeep, told it’s owner we wanted it for another day, and then headed up north to a small island connected to Koh Pha Ngan by a sand bar. There we rented snorkels and did a little swimming and tanning and exploring. Dave, Annie and myself all injured our feet by accidentally stepping on some coral in the shallow areas. It was difficult to snorkel since it was so shallow and on more than one occasion you would be floating above a rock and a wave would recede causing you to scratch yourself on it. Alisa and I found a deeper spot a little further out that was 100x better than the sea cucumber infested shallows. Out there I saw so many different types of fish and a lot of colorful coral.
After that we drove back towards the hotel, but ended up taking a wrong turn and got a bit lost. We stopped for some lupper (lunch/supper) and then headed back to our place to get a nap in. The girls passed out right away, but Dave and I went down to the beach to get some pics of the setting sun. Afterwards I layed down in the hammock on our balcony and chilled while listening to some music. I woke up just in time to catch the sunset and thank goodness I did, it was unbelievable. After that I passed out till 9pm and upon awakening, we grabbed some dinner and made our way to the FMP!
Honestly, I think the night before the party was the best since it was a bit less crowded but it was still awesome! After convincing my stomach that it wanted to drink again we grabbed some buckets and chilled in the sand for a bit. Then we did some dancing and some exploring. I went to get my arm painted with some fluorescent paint and the girls ended up doing the same. We danced the rest of the night away until the sun came up. That was so cool, even though it was cloudy! A cab ride later and we passed out for a few hours before having to be up at 9am.
The rest of the day was pretty terrible and I don’t really want to talk about it haha. Basically, we took a truck from the hotel to the dock and barely made our ferry because the truck took its sweet time leaving. The ferry was packed so we paid a little extra to sit in the VIP area and sleep. It stopped at Koh Samui before continuing to the mainland. There we hopped on a huge bus and travelled to the company’s bus transfer station. There we hopped on a small truck/cab and travelled in the same direction we had just come from, only to be dropped off at a small café and be told that our bus to Phuket would be leaving in an hour. 2 hours later we departed in an extremely cramped 15 person van that was packed to capacity. The ride to Phuket was 4 hours and we stopped once in the middle. The plan was to go to Phuket town and get a place there, however an English dude was staying at the airport hotel and when we arrived there we all got out.
So from there, Dave and the girls flew home on Tuesday morning while I jumped a cab (which actually ended up being 2 cabs because the first driver didn’t know where my hotel was and dropped me off at the wrong place) and headed out on my own.
Okay. I’m gonna post this and then hopefully update it again after I meet up with the girls in Laos on Saturday to let you know what my individual travelling experience was like.
Miss you all and love you lots.
Matty
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