Day 54 - Ko Pha Ngan (Full Moon party)

  Ko Phangan, Thailand
Friday, October 26, 2007

Today promised to be a memorable event, mainly because of this large, glowing, celestial object!



(In fact, as it turned out, it was going to be a long, late, drunken, monumental night!)

Tonight is the night of the world famous "full moon party", where up to 30,000 people gather on Kho Pha Ngan's 'Haad Rin' beach for an evening of rejoicement and merriment, however you spell them! 

Oh, and don't forget the harder and faster block-rocking beats. Where are DJs Hellier & Learney when you need them?!

For once I succumbed to breakfast, which was not really worth the 20 minute walk in the driving rain, but it would have had to have been really quite spectacular to be fair...

My main task today was to get our photos loaded onto CDs, to re-size them, and to load them onto this website and to Facebook.

This probably sounds quite simple, but it honestly takes bloody AGES!! 

The first part involved sitting in a photo development shop for 2 full HOURS going through my memory cards/photos with a very helpful woman who was able to recover some of the photos after the damaged SD card was playing silly buggers.

Let the record show that back in London, PC World tried to charge me £60/$120 just to LOOK at the memory card, whereas she did whatever she could, all for free. Well, I did spend a bloody fortune getting them ripped onto CDs, but - as they say - nothing in this life comes for free!

Re-sizing the photos online then took another 2 hours, and attaching them onto Facebook & Travelpod took another couple of hours, but hopefully it was all worth it, with the blogs now looking a bit more interesting!

Nearly all the blog entries on here now have photos inserted into the text, so if you get a few minutes try and re-visit some of them. You can now skip my waffling and go straight to the photos ;)

All the time spent on the computer had really tired me out (I don't know how you 'wage slaves' do it!) so we went back to the hotel to chill before the main event this evening.

There were signs everywhere to whet the appetite...



Katie had spied a nice place to eat near the beach, which also (surely a coincidence?!) happened to do very nice cocktails!

Katie was over the (full) moon at being able to order some brown rice with her pumpkin curry, and my veggie lasagne was pretty good too. The cocktails were also great: Katie's was basically an alcoholic smoothie, and I couldn't resist my good friend Mr White Russian!

A few cocktails later we walked onto the beach (now about 10pm), which already had a few nutters dancing around covered in neon bodypaint, but it was nowhere near full yet. 

We walked to the right end of the beach and found a nice bar overlooking the beach, and waited for it all to kick off.

An hour or so later, we hadn't seen much in the way of madness, but some young Asian guys started sending these mini hot air balloons powered by candles up into the air, which was quite cool until the police stopped them, the Scrooge McDucks... bah humbug!



We had a couple more cocktails in the bar, played a bit of pool, and then started on the "buckets", which are something of a Full Moon party institution.

I strongly suggest that you concentrate on this explanation, it might get a bit tricky....

"Buckets" are... erm.... small plastic buckets filled with alcohol, ice and drinking straws!

Everyone still with me?!?!

Well done, excellent work ;) B+

This is what they look like:



We started on the vodka & coke buckets, which soon became vodka & red bull buckets, and by the end could have been meths & petrol buckets, because I think my taste buds had stopped working! Christ they were strong.

We walked up and down the beach, trying different bars, different spots, different vibes.

There were huge soundsystems booming out from most of the beachfront bars, all with a slightly different type of (very loud) dance music shaking the foundations...

It was like Glastonbury on the beach. Without the burger vans. Or tents. Ok, it was nothing like it.

I did however manage to find an outside bar playing The Doors, which was a great place to chill out for a bit, and then we waded back into the throngs of 'insania'...

There were people juggling with fire, which always looks more impressive when you're drunk, some of them were only about 10 years old which made it even more impressive!

Even better, they made some REALLY cool photos...



Buckets were on sale all up the beach, from fancy bars to Mom & Pop stalls with their names above.

As soon as you walked anywhere NEAR the stalls you had about 50 people SCREAMING for you to come and buy from them, it was borderline terrifying!

We ended up buying mainly from a guy called "Arnold" (see below), because Katie decided that she liked his name! He was extraordinarily grateful for our patronage, and he also took a nice photo of us, well played Arnold you legend ;)





We eventually settled at a place playing some retro house tunes, where we promptly ran out of money.

We had somehow managed to go through about 3000 bahts ($100) in a few hours, but we were still 'mad for it' so went to get some more money out from one of the ATMs on the main street.

Getting through the crowds was easier said than done though!

Woop-woop!



Put your hands in the air like you just don't cay-re...





Unfortunately the ATM was having none of these drunken Islingtonians' jib, and resolutely refused to dispense any cash, presumably because we'd maxed out our daily limit.

You can imagine how amused we were that this meant that we now had to walk back to the hotel in our less-than-sober state, to get another card...

So we walked back up the hill to our hotel, grabbed our other cash card, and headed back to the ATM, only to find that this card was also rejected! The air turned as blue as my shirt.

It was now about 2am, so we decided to give up as all our walking and frustration had worn off our happy drunkeness, which now threatened to become red mist!

To be fair, we also didn't have much choice as we were totally out of cash, although I might have been able to sell Katie for a few more buckets with hindsight ;) 

This was another painful example proving to us that Thailand is the #1 country in the world for credit card fraud, as both of our banks have now told us a number of times now. 

We've had our cards 'stopped' a number of times over here, because our dear banks have kindly decided to stop us taking our own money out of our own accounts!!!

They seem to think that it's more acceptable that they take no chances, rather than giving you access to YOUR money (which can be rather useful in an emergency?!). I wouldn't mind, but you think they could at least send you an email or contact you before they cut off your cash. Pathetic.

In fact, Katie has just spent the last 30 minutes getting progressively more angry at NatWest for putting a stop on TWO of her cards, yet they told her that neither card had been stopped.

Needless to say 10 minutes later they agreed that yes they have indeed been stopped, but of course they didn't apologise for their mistake, or the time & money wasted on a mobile call from Thailand... heaven forbid they give a customer some service!

We'll be glad to get to Oz, where hopefully we can take money out without being treated like street thieves, or without nearly head-butting the ATM when it says "account or amount is invalid"!!! Grrrrrr. Why I oughta...

It's so frustrating when they lock down your cards because it costs a bloody fortune when we need to call them, which is what they say we should do whenever we have a problem! 

Even worse, when you do call, you spend at LEAST 30 minutes talking to various different people or departments before you get anywhere because they are all so incompetent. 

Muppets.

Ok, rant over, but as you can imagine, by this stage our big night was over, we were both pretty wasted, so much so that for once I forgot to drink any water before going to bed, to take my contact lenses out, or to even close the curtains! Raaaay...

So you can perhaps imagine my pain when our alarm went the next morning?! Ouch. Sore Head City, Arizona. 

I felt like an elephant had been jumping up and down on my head and then used my mouth as a toilet, before kicking me in the nuts.

Nice.

Anyway, we had made it through the full moon party alive, with some great memories, but with a growing hatred for NatWest bank!

Lots of love,


Al & Katie xx