I Can't Believe I Went to a Full Moon Party...Thailand. Again.

Dec. 6, 2012

And it was back to Bangkok. This city really was shaping up to be my own personal crossroads for Asia. Unfortunately I am always passing through this city, only having enough time to take care of the things that need to be done before moving to the next place. My fifth time in Bangkok, and I still wasn’t going to give it the attention it deserves. I had more important plans, though. I was about to meet up with Harley, who I hadn’t seen since he left our house in Arizona over two years earlier. He had just finished his service in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, and was now coming to travel Southeast Asia with a few of his friends that he had served with. Meeting up with Harley was particularly significant since I still felt bad for not visiting him when I had been in West Africa. This was now a chance to partially redeem myself.

It was fun to see what this group of guys were like after 27 months in Cameroon, especially as they arrived in a place as completely different as Bangkok. Their eyes were wide and mouths agape at the futuristic transportation, skyscrapers, women in short shorts and skirts, bright lights and great street food. It was quite the contrast for me too, coming from India, but I had just been here a couple months earlier. One thing that they were used to, though, was lots of beer drinking. Cameroon drinks more beer per capita than anywhere in Africa, so what I was seeing in their thirst was not relief from being done with the Peace Corps, but instead business as usual.

Our first night we found ourselves having dinner and beers at a makeshift restaurant with a dirty old Aussie bloke. He was a perfect stereotype of the old man expat in Thailand. He had a Thai wife, who was not around for whatever reason, but he spoke Thai well. He was a good source of information, and an entertaining character. However, he was still a dirty old man who served as a good warning to anyone wanting to spend too much time in Thailand. Do you really want to end up like him?

Most of our couple days in Bangkok was filled with running errands, chasing down street food and playing cards, with all the gaps in between filled with beer. Although we were not staying in Khao San Road, we started to border on that level of obnoxiousness that comes from the frat boy tourists in that part of town. Luckily we would be heading down to an island soon where we would feel a little more free.

The night before we left Bangkok, a couple of Peace Corps Volunteers serving in Thailand came to meet up with us. One of them was going to take us to an island that she liked. Then, in the morning, something came up and she was not able to go. Now we were on our own to figure out our plans. She had been planning to take us to Koh Chang, an island I had already been to, but instead we decided to head farther south. We went to the train station to find the next train that would be heading that direction. An overnight train would be leaving that evening, so we had the whole day to hang out at the train station.

We had been too cheap to spring for the sleeper car, so it was a pleasant surprise when we found that our third class car was not too packed. A couple of us even had room to stretch out. We had decided to go to Ko Pha-Ngan, one of Thailand’s most popular islands. We had chosen it because it was accessible, had a lot to do and was not as developed for tourism as places like Ko Samui. As I looked through the guidebook, I discovered that Ko Pha-Ngan was the island where Thailand’s notorious full moon parties originated. I knew that we all had mixed feeling about something like that. I asked Patrick if he could see the moon out the window. He said yes. I asked how it looked. “Pretty close to full,” he said. Unless it was full the day before, we would be there in time for the world’s biggest beach party. I think the prospect of this made us all nervous, especially since we were just stumbling into it. Everything I read about it made me question if it was even a good idea to go. The amount of people, the drugs, the abundance of police (corrupt or otherwise), thieves, spring breakers, occasional deaths due to undertows or drugs, are all things that made the Full Mood Party a little intimidating. We just had to wait and see if it was actually in the cards.

None of us got much sleep on the train. I hadn’t gotten the best sleep the previous nights either as I had volunteered to take the floor of our double room. When we arrived at the train station at Phun Phin around 7 AM, we were starving. We found the nearest basic restaurant and ordered a round of noodle soups and beers. Then we grabbed a bus going to Surat Thani, the nearest town to the ferry terminal. When we arrived there, we got into a sawngthaew (pickup truck with bench seats) to take us to a ferry terminal. We agreed on the price of thirty Baht each beforehand. When we got there, though, the driver seemed to be unhappy with the money we gave him. He now said the price was 90 Baht per person. I told him he was trying to cheat us, and that we wouldn’t pay any more. I knew that the other Thai passengers had not paid 90. I also assumed that he usually dealt with tourists that wouldn’t question him. We argued further until he threatened to call the police. I told him to go ahead. He walked to the nearby ferry ticket office. Everyone else said they didn’t want to deal with police and wanted to just pay. It was a difference of two dollars each. I just didn’t want to make it that easy for him to rip people off. I wasn’t going to drag them into my stubbornness so we paid up.

As soon as we got to the ferry, we realized we would indeed be there for a full moon party. People boarding the boat were already sporting shirts that read “Full Moon Party Dec. 9, 2012”. Then I remembered that some hippy in India had mentioned there would be an eclipse on the 9^th. So we were heading straight into a Full Moon Party in Thailand’s highest tourist season with an eclipse in the forecast. Plus we were on a very limited amount of sleep. So what did we do on the ferry ride? Well, we had a few rounds of strong beers to see what would happen. Then there were some Thai guys sitting outside that kept inviting us to rounds of Mekong whiskey. It was already getting scary.

When we got off the ferry we past the hordes of taxi drivers and sawngthaews offering rides to various parts of the island. The fares looked exorbitant and we were sure we could find something better. During our search, I ran into a dread-locked Korean guy named Chris that I had volunteered with in Kolkata. Back in India he was a kind and charming character. In Thailand, he was a sloshed party animal. It was an amazing coincidence, but at the same time, it further proves that Thailand is the crossroads of my universe.

As it turned out, waiting around wasn’t the best idea. We had figured that there might be some sort of public transport around the island that would take us close to our destination. This turned out to be a terribly wrong assumption. As it turned out, though, hiring an entire sawngthaew to ourselves was about the same price as if we had taken the shared ones for tourists to begin with.

Half an hour of driving through jungle covered hills and we were eventually delivered to what turned out to be pretty close to paradise, in the cliché sense of the word. There was a beach (a bit small and rocky) plenty of palm trees, dramatic emerald peaks rising behind us, and a mysterious little island a few hundred meters offshore. We checked into our little wooden bungalows. Paul, Harley and I shared a double, while Henry and Patrick shared the other double. We had a hammock on our little deck, but I ripped straight through it within the first few hours. There were thoughts of napping, but who were we kidding? There was a beach and a beer store nearby.

That evening, we caught a sawngthaew that was leaving our area around 9. There were also some German and French girls riding with us. They all seemed either reserved, unfriendly, or perhaps avoiding a group of obnoxious American guys. By the end of the ride, though, they were at least a little more friendly. We had gone through miles of dark, quiet, and almost empty roads to reach the chaos that was going down at Hat Rin, the beach that hosts the full moon parties. The streets were packed with foreigners heading toward the beach. The proper attire seemed to be some sort of white tank top with lots of glow paint on the shirt, face or body. I felt overdressed in my Kolkata t-shirt. After getting out of the truck, the German girls wandered off somewhere, but the French girls stuck around with us. We grabbed a couple of whiskey bucket kits on the way in, which included a bucket, a medium bottle of Mekong whiskey, and Red Bull. Thailand is the only place I’ve been other than Coeur d’Alene, ID where buckets of booze are standard.

Within thirty minutes of getting to the party, I got separated from Harley, Paul and the French girls. So it was just Henry and I for a while. Getting separated and then searching for each other would be a common theme of the night. But with half a mile of beach, endless clubs and tens of thousands of people, it was almost impossible to find each other. It didn’t matter much anyway. Sometimes we were all together; sometimes I was with Paul and sometimes with Henry. Either way, though, it was always a good time. The crowd was exceptionally Euro-trashy. It was far more of a Scandanavian spring break crowd than the fire-spinning hippie crowd one might expect at this party. Beyond the music and dancing, there were plenty of things to keep us entertained. There was a giant inflatable water slide, food stalls, a flaming jump rope, an ocean, a flaming limbo stick and probably other things that I have forgotten about. As expected, I was killing it on the limbo stick, but didn’t get proper recognition as a limbo master since nobody else had respect for the limbo rules. 

Henry and I were the last two standing when the sun started to come up. At that point, people started to really get into the idea of swimming. I couldn’t resist. I set my things on a wooden platform and asked Henry to watch them while I took a dip. When I got out, I didn’t see Henry, or my blue scarf that I had left on the platform. I saw that my scarf had been knocked off and was rolling around in the water. Then I saw Henry dancing off to the side, not paying attention. Then I noticed my zipper pouch that I had had my money in was gone. I looked around and suddenly saw a Thai guy walking away with it. I approached him and said it was mine, and he just handed it back, apologized and scurried off.

Not long after, Henry and I decided to make our way back home. It was surprisingly easy to find a Sangthaew going in our direction. In the chaos of the night, almost all the people around us had been strangers. Now we were back in a more social context, meeting the people that we had been partying alongside the whole night. It was almost awkward, especially since I did not want to be the same kind of person as those we were riding with. Either way, we could all partake in the camaraderie of having been through a full moon party together.

I woke around 1 PM the next day, which is incredibly late for me no matter the circumstances. I was amazed to find the whole crew already at a table on the beach getting into their first (or third for some) beers. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that, but the peer pressure and the desire to kick around stories from the night before got the better of me. Of course I felt great after a bit. It turned out that three of the four of us that went (forgot to mention that Patrick didn’t want to go to the party) had had thieves try to work their magic on us. Harley, who had left the earliest of all of us, had his phone picked from his pocket. Paul, however, had the best story. At some point in the night, in a crowded area where everyone was dancing, a Thai woman approached Paul. She began to dance with him closely. After a few moments, he realized she was a lady boy. Before he knew it, she had smiled and left. Paul immediately checked his pockets, and realized his wallet was missing. He ran after her and grabbed her shoulder. She turned around, pulled out his wallet, handed it back, smiled, and said, “sorry!”