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Party Central
Entry 45 of 47 | show all | print this entry |
The journey to Ko Pha-Ngan was fairly hassle-free. I hopped onto an express ferry to Krabi and took a spot on the deck to lounge around and top up my tan - which worked tremendously by the way. I am now approaching Eddie Murphy's colour. Ok maybe not but I think I'll be looking pretty tanned in the sea of milk-skinned people roaming around back home. In Krabi we were shuffled onto an ancient bus with 'air conditioning' (a steady, thread-thin flow of slightly chilled air blowing everywhere but on me). Somehow I managed to be the last person on, and so was lumped with the seat at the back next to a sweaty Dane with backpacks surrounding me on all sides. I have taken a great deal of pride in being able to shed my English queueing rules in the past year, and shoving myself onto a bus as close to first as possible has become all but second nature so I have only myself to blame.
No matter, we were only on the bus for 3 hours before we were put onto another bigger, slower ferry from Suratthani to Ko Pha-Ngan where I met Morwenna, Claire and Lee on the deck. We all sat around for a bit, reading, chatting, taking tourist photos of the sunset, and Lee and I played a bit of guitar much to the approval of two Thai gents who sat and listened pensively. Night came, we arrived at Ko Pha-Ngan and walked off the ferry into the local 'bus' that took us to Hat Rin. It was severely overloaded already, and we picked up a couple of Thai and English people on the way so there were strangers sitting on laps all over the place and a couple of people hanging off the back while their mates held onto them to make sure they didn't die a painful death from rolling down 40 degree inclines. I was fine of course, enjoying the show from within my cocoon of people and finding the whole situation quite amusing.
We arrived in Hat Rin, checked into our amazing air-conditioned bungalow and went to sample the legendary buckets that we'd heard so much about from other travellers. These are literally buckets (sandcastle size) usually filled with a whole small bottle of some kind of spirit, a Redbull, and topped up with Coke, but of course there are variations on the theme. Basically, it's designed solely to get you drunk, and would be made illegal in England as soon as some bright spark came up with the idea. And so began a week and a half of equal amounts of partying, recovering, eating, chilling and SCUBA diving. Yes folks, you are now reading from the pages of a fully-qualified Open Water SCUBA Diver. You lucky lot, you.
After Morwenna had moved on to Ko Tao I was left on my own for a day before Carsten arrived from The Sanctuary. Having eaten nothing but papaya salads and coconuts, he was pretty desperate for something a bit more substantial so we went on a mission to find some Thai food with an entire cow in it. Shortly afterwards, I went to book my SCUBA diving course which would keep me occupied for the next 5 days while Carsten sat around on the balcony doing not very much at all. At least until Chris got here anyway. Then they both sat on the balcony doing not very much at all while I slaved away getting up at 6am every morning.
Well it was worth it. On the last day of the course I went out on the boat to do the final 2 dives around Ko Tao which is renowned to be one of the best places to dive in the world. It was absolutely amazing. The first dive was around a pinnacle covered in all different types and colours of coral. An underwater mini-mountain with little coloured christmas tree worms popping up everywhere and shoals of brightly coloured fish swimming in perfect harmony not more than a couple of feet from the rock. There were Trigger Fish a couple of feet long that kept going for the dive leader - presumably we'd got too close to their nest - which made for some pretty comical moments. It's extremely difficult to laugh underwater however, as I found out when my mouth filled with seawater.
The whole experience was incredible. You feel weightless, floating around with nothing to hold you. Breathe in, you float up, breathe out, you sink down, and all the while you're surrounded by multi-coloured fish and 4 ft Barracudas just swimming around minding their own business. Two dives later after seeing a pufferfish, a dead stingray and a mulicoloured jellyfish, it was time to go back to Hat Rin and get a much-needed schnitzel sandwich, before preparing ourselves for the reason we were here - The Full Moon Party.
I had a nap for a couple of hours before I was rudely awakened by Carsten and Chris. It was time to get ready. We walked down to the beach around 11:30 and were greeted by thousands of smiling people dancing to Psy-trance in the pouring rain as hard and fast as they could. There were girls wearing just bikinis, blokes in boardshorts, people raving inside their ponchos and under umbrellas, fire-jugglers, neon lights, pumping music, buckets and beer bottles abound. The weather didn't stop anyone and all along the beach, the clubs had turned out their speaker systems to the various congregations of people devoted to the genre being played. You couldn't help but walk around with a smile on your face, and we checked out the whole beach a couple of times before settling on a place with a stage and plenty of crazy revellers to chat to. And there we stayed - with a couple of little excursions to check out the other music - until 7am. I somehow managed to lose Chris and Carsten and made my way back to the bungalow to see if anyone was there. Nope. I sat on the balcony and waited until Carsten came round the corner thinking thank God I can go to bed. At least until those fateful words left Carsten's lips...
"I've lost the key"
"You what?"
Reception didn't open until 9 so we slept on the balcony for two hours being driven mad by flies and mosquitos. Why don't they get the message? You wave them off your leg and then they just fly around for 2 seconds and land in exactly the same spot. Then when you've done this for the 8th time it starts to get pretty annoying so I start swearing about "****ing" flies and "why can't they all just die?" Which is when some clever person starts going on about the food chain screwing up and annoys me even more with their little insights as to 'how many animals would die if we killed all the flies'. Fine then we'll just get rid of the excess ones, the ones that don't get eaten by spiders or birds and spend their entire lives pissing me off by pointlessly landing on my leg.
After these two hours of torture we finally got a spare key, and went to bed until 2pm.
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