Ko Samui

The train journey from Trang to Surat Thani - the leaving point for boats to Ko Samui - was a pretty straightforward and comfortable affair. However, my main concern was that we were heading to a place where thousands of other people were also heading for the full moon party, plus it was thai new year so it was the biggest full moon party of the year, and we hadn't managed to book any accomadation.

We decided that rather than wasting time in Surat Thani trying to make a concrete booking we should head straight to Ko Samui (the larger island directly south of Ko Pha Ngan where the party is) where we hoped we could find somewhere to stay and then take a ferry over for the party. With this "plan" we bought our tickets for the overnight ferry to Ko Samui. The boat looked fairly spacious at first glance, but it turned out to be full of matresses approximately 2 foot wide where we were expected to sleep during the 7 hour journey. Despite the rather close proximity to random strangers I managed to get a half-decent nights sleep. More importantly we managed to get ourselves some decent (although overpriced) accomadation on Lamai beach.

Lamai is the second liveliest place on the island in terms of nightlife and it came as a bit of a shock to the system to be thrown in with a load of package-holidayers (Samui is a popular destination and has it's own airport). However, we were on the edge of the area and so had a pretty quiet beach on which to get some relaxation before the party.

We knew that the following day was Thai New Year and that this was celebrated with a water fight, but we were still for some unknown reason greatly suprised when seconds after leaving our room we were drenched and covered in baby powder! The entire day is spent with water pistols, hoses and buckets trying to soak anyone who comes near you (especially the non-Thais or so it seemed!). I'm not sure how traditional the addition of baby powder is but it doesn't combine well with the water as you can imagine.

By mid afternoon this got a little tiresome so we escaped to the beach for a while to kill time before our early evening pick up to Ko Pha Ngan. The speedboat only took about 45 minutes so we arrived at Hat Rin around 7.30. The party was great fun although not exactly the atmosphere I was expecting. I though it would be a hippyfied, chilled out, festival vibe love-in type of event when in actual fact it's just an almighty piss-up. Put it this way - almost all alcohol is sold in buckets! Say no more. Even so, we had a good night and managed to keep drinking and dancing until our ferry home at 7 am.

The journey home proved almost as interesting as the party. A combination of alcohol and tiredness created a bit of an argument between a foul mouthed Thai girl (with an excellent grasp of English slang) and an English girl which culminated in punches and water bottles being thrown to the delight of the watching boat staff who looked on bemused and repeated the word "crazy" every few minutes. When the transfer back to our hotel finally arrived it didn't have quite enough room leaving us the choice of waiting for another one to arrive or hanging onto the back. At that time in the morning I thought nothing could keep me awake much longer, but the wind in my face hanging onto the back of a truck for 45 minutes proved me wrong!

To aid our recovery over the next couple of days we made the decision to relocate away from the package-holiday hordes to Maenam, a small fishing village on the north coast of Samui (and one of the only places not purely dedicated to tourism). The village boasts little more than a quiet beach (although coarse by Samui's high standards), a small market and a high street of bars and restaurants but it made for a relaxing stay and was an ideal position from which to take a day-trip to the nearby National Marine Park.

---

---