Day 53 - Ko Pha Ngan

  Ko Phangan, Thailand
Thursday, October 25, 2007

I tried my best to watch the game last night, but sadly fate conspired against me...

The island had a number of power cuts yesterday evening, which produced some choice language from a young Suffolk lad who was trying to update his blog in the email cafe, but ironic cheers everywhere else.

It was quite amusing the first time, but by the 3rd power cut in an hour I think everyone was getting bored of it. After starting the same blog entry 3 times, I was losing the will to live!

I realised that if the power cut off half way through the game then I would probably end up killing someone having stayed up that late, so I decided that maybe it was best to go back to the room and go to sleep, and catch the highlights this morning instead.

As it turned out, we played like absolute muppets (again) and lost 2-1, so I'm in no hurry to see the 'lowlights'. We usually squeak through the group stages, so fingers crossed we can do it again...

At least not staying up until 3am meant that I could also rise at a reasonable time, so by 9:45am I was out on a sun lounger by the pool, thinking "this is the life..." and feeling really quite smug.

Katie joined me after her breakfast (which is clearly for wimps), then we sat and baked in the sun for an hour or so, before the clouds came over, after which the sun appeared only sporadically.

We went for a walk around the beach & rocks to get to the very bottom of the island, which was quite nice, and then it started to rain so we went back to our bungalow and crashed out for an hour, which was lovely.



 

After that we walked into town to get some dinner and copy some photos onto CD to free up some space on the camera cards, so hopefully I can load some of them up onto previous entries on here either tonight or tomorrow.

Unfortunately some of the memory cards have corrupted, so I need to try and find somewhere with some software to hopefully recover some of the affected images.

The island is noticeably filling up ahead of tomorrow night's Full Moon party, and despite my pathological hatred of loud dance music I'm actually quite looking forward to it...

Apparently there will be somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people on the beach of Haan Rin which is just 5 mins walk/stagger away from our secluded little bay, so it should be quite something.

We just went down onto the 'sunrise' beach (yes, on the east coast of the island, very good!) where the Full Moon thing kicks off, and it looks really cool: massive soundsystems, lots of bright lights, fire eaters & fire jugglers, tons of stalls selling buckets (?!) of spirits & mixers, God Only Knows what awaits us there tomorrow night!

Katie said that she feels like a "grandmother" here because we're at least a few years older than most of the other westerners, but it doesn't bother me at all. Maybe that's because admiring young female Scandinavians has never really been much of a drag to me ;)

Seriously, we're clearly not the oldest people here, but it's a real "backpacker's paradise".

Katie went back for an early night tonight, even though I fancied a few beers on the beach. I caved in and went back with Katie, on the condition that tomorrow is significantly "larger"!

Ok, hope all is well in your worlds and try and drop us a quick email, if you get a spare minute.

Lots of love,


Al & Katie xx