Las Vegas of Thailand
Trip Start
Oct 17, 2007
1
11
19
Trip End
Mar 14, 2008
Ko Phangan,
Thailand
Thursday, December 27, 2007
The internet where we've been staying is about 25cents / minute so I've been too cheap to write.
The last 8, or 9 . . . or 10 days (totally lost count) have been an absolute blast. We moved over to the party beach really not knowing what to expect and it by far exceeded whatever lack of expectations we had... or didn't have I guess. We were staying in a bungalow right at the end of the beach with an amazing view of the whole thing so every night we would get a group of us out on our balcony and just watch the throngs of people pour out onto the beach. For anyone who hasn't been to Haad Rin, I'll give you a little bit of a rundown. On the beach by day there's tons of people playing beach volleyball, beach soccer, swimming, skim boarding, Seadooing, nude sun-bathing and all that other good stuff
xmas1
. Just off the beach, there are tons of restaurants showing movies, tv shows, soccer games etc... So you're pretty much up to something at all times, whether you like it or not. On top of that, every place you go seems to be pumping hard-core techno music at ear-splitting levels. At first it's a bit much, then it grows on you... then it goes back to being a bit much all over again. I guess you really need to be in a red-bull type of mood to enjoy that type of music. Then at night, everyone goes to the beach and dances it up to the music all night. Not exactly a healthy lifestyle, but good times for a few days nonetheless. This is Haad-Rin Sunrise Beach in a nutshell.So yeah, for the last few days, however many days it's been, we've been going back and forth between loving and not-so-loving this scene. For the most part though, it's been great. The best part was probably that we ran into a whole bunch of different groups of people we'd made friends with over the last 2 months so it's been a massive reunion.
The Half-Moon party turned out to be decent, but it was basically just a big dance-floor in the jungle... The beach parties though were out of this world. Everyone is in a good mood, there's good music, crazy fire shows and all of it is set to a beautiful backdrop of clear skies, the ocean and warm weather..
xmas2
. Perfect. So every night, these beach parties would go on and every night seemed to get bigger and bigger working up to the Full-Moon Party which was on Christmas Eve. It seemed as if every single traveller in Southeast Asia was migrating here. Then came the Full Moon Party... You could tell that there was something different in the air on the day leading up to it. It could have been the abundance of people in town, but you could definitely tell there was a buzz in the air as well. We sat up on our balcony with a few of usjust watching things unfold at about 10 o'clock for a couple of drinks before we went down to join in the madness. At that point there were easily a few thousand people on the beach. By midnight it was probably closer to ten thousand people. So after a few Christmas carols, we put on our Santa hats, grabbed a few branches with leaves on them as mistle-toe and made our entrance. Absolutely brilliant. I don't even have the words, it was just such an amazing time. We snapped some photos and vids on Karl's camera which will definitely help to capture the epic night, but you really need to see it to believe it. The beach the morning after the party (people are still dancing their asses off at 9 in the morning) was a complete disgrace though. Everywhere you looked there were buckets, straws, cups, "sleeping" people, and other garbage. They must have had a pretty intense cleaning crew though because it looked almost presentable by the afternoon.The next day we got a big group of us out to a British Pub-style restaurant and had a good old-fashioned Western Christmas dinner which worked well to cure the home-sickness. I'm definitely jealous that we got a white Christmas back home though! Now we're waiting for Nik to arrive and work ourselves up to New Year's which apparently is almost twice as big... Can't wait.
