Stranded in KOh Phangan...

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Currently we are stranded on Koh Phangan. Admittedly there are worse places to be stranded than a beautiful Thai island but we had been looking forward to escaping the madness that is this tourist-centred party island and heading to the, hopefully, more chilled out Koh Tao to swim with the pretty fisheys!

The plan was to get the ferry over to Koh Tao this morning to check in for our PADI course, a thought I had been psyching myself up for as, much as I'm looking forward to it I'm also a little apprehensive as I'm not exactly a mermaid in the water. SO having packed up our bags and gone to check out we're told no ferries are running due to the massive downpour we had last night. Had this not been so disappointing I would have found it reassuring as I had been trying to convince myself that were it too dangerous the ferry would indeed be cancelled but I was having trouble convincing either myself or Verity of this as the things we've seen here so far haven't exactly demonstrated that the Thais are as overly concerned with safety as us Brits! Refreshing in some ways, terrifying in others!

The Full Moon party for instance was a blast, albeit a tourist infested club scene type balst of the sort that I would never enjoy at home. The combination of atmosphere and cocktails (not from a bucket...I am SO over buckets) seemed to induce a weird reaction in me in that the initial intimidation and 'oh my GOd this music sucks' feeling was quickly replaced with an out of body experience whereby I found myself dancing along to music I would usually avoid like the plague and whooping as loud as the next person. Every night on KOh Phangan is party night and it's a strange experience to see the rows of bucket stalls on the beach and have the vendors shouting at you to buy their 'fucking cheap buckets'. It's slightly disconcerting what clearly sells to us Western tourists....one vendor jokingly (I hope) offered free blow jobs with every purchase! We'd been down a couple of nights before Full Moon and had I have to say the vibe had been slightly different to the big party itself. It seemed more chilled out and I can't help thinking, in a superior 'I'm a traveller not a holiday maker' way that it's because there were a lot of people at Full moon that were purely there for the one night of drunken debauchery. Overall it struck me as a little sad how we come here and destroy paradise...glass bottles on the beach, 'adorably' drunken men peeing in the sea...

It's been fun and to be honest I probably would come again, you just have to recognise it for what it is and take it all with a pinch of sea salt. Oh...and appreciate the rare opportunity to sit in a wooden shack of a bar and watch Friends and movies all day when it rains and there's sod all else to do.

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