Koh Phangan, Thailand – Experiencing the Full Moon Party

In my last blog I wrote about the Full Moon Party that we were going to attend; what I thought we would encounter, what I thought we’d expect (mainly that we would hate it). I don’t take back all the negative things I said about it; yes, there was still that horrendous rave/trance music; yes, most people were doing drugs; yes, most people were still up until the following night; yes, there were a lot of younger people there. But, it turned out to be one of the best things to do in Koh Phangan!

However, we found music we liked, we had a drug-less night by sticking to Red bulls, Bacardi and juice, went to bed before the sun came up and found some cool people to hangout with. It actually turned out to be one of the best parties we’ve been to, and is one of the coolest things to do in Thailand.

The beach was lined with bars, all of which spilled out onto the sand, playing different kinds of music. There were massive speakers set up on the beach and people were everywhere – this party had about 20,000. We found a bar (Cactus) that was playing pretty good music so we hungout outside of that one for the night, leaving to the streets every once in a while to refill our sand castle bucket drink, or to buy some beer from the 7-11.

Black lights were everywhere so all the party people were wearing glowing hats, glow sticks, and covered their bodies with black light body paint. We also partook in this. Nick was wearing a ball cap made out of glow sticks, complete with matching massive, hilarious, glow stick sunglasses (just the rims of course) and had his body painted with a Canadian flag, goatsontheroad written across his back and our dates of travel up his arm.

I was wearing a tank top so Nick painted a massive Canadian flag across the top of my chest, I had my arms painted on with travel stuff and was wearing a fedora hat that was previously painted on with the same glowing paint – basically just designs and it said Full Moon Party (it was only the next day when I sobered up that I realized it said “2011” instead of 2012!).

The party was a blast. Everyone was representing their countries loud and proud. The Canadians were out in full force. Someone had devised a flag using a massive bamboo stick as the staff and had a Canadian flag on the end of it, we met so many fellow countrymen that night, all with the same body paint flag or “Canadian ‘eh?” written all over them.

The Swedes were representing pretty hard as well, they all came barrelling down the side streets to the party chanting in their language, their blue and yellow flags displayed all over their bodies. The Brazilians were huddling up all over the streets, arms around each other, jumping up and down and chanting in Portuguese…complete with soccer jerseys painted on their chests and backs, typical!

☞ SEE ALSO:

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The Israelis, who typically dominate the island, all showed up and outnumbered everyone there. People from different countries and races were all admiring each others artwork, joking, dancing and laughing together, it was awesome.

We ended up heading home around 5:00am…just about the time I realized that the camera I had been carrying the whole night was MIA. I was gutted. All the pictures from that night were on there, some incriminating, some not. All the memories, evidence and good times are gone, probably buried in the sand or washed out to sea.

Perhaps it’s for the best. As my wise father said “maybe what happens in Thailand should stay in Thailand”. So, you will all have to use your imaginations to picture this epic party. It was one for the books.

We woke up the next morning, body paint caked to our skin, sand all over us, rolled over and went to see the carnage from the night before. The beach was littered with beer bottles, straws, overturned sand castle buckets, t-shirts and so many flip-flops. We were exhausted and hungover so the day was spent mainly laying on the beach and going for the odd swim. We did take a motorbike to the police station to see if our camera had been turned in, with no luck.

We were up the following morning at 5:00am to travel from Koh Phangan to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. We packed up our bags and said goodbye to our hut, a place that had been our home for almost a month. It was going to be a very long travel day.

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