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At the end of my last entry, I was suffering at the hands of yet another journey glitch!! Anyway, the bus did EVENTUALLY turn up at midnight, not at 8.30pm as expected and we all fell asleep quite quickly once we got on, only to awake at 7am feeling thoroughly grouchy and having to board at catamaran...
Arriving on the island of Koh Tao, we made our way to one of the main beaches and walked along it with our rucksacks to find some cheap beach bungalows. We settled with a place we liked and basically grabbed our bikini's and hit the beach straight away. It was nice to start to feel relaxed again, as we hadn't done any 'chill out' time since the Camodian coast. Koh Tao is a very small island but manages to squeeze plenty of dive places on it as it's one of the main places renowned for it, and the white sand beaches are a massive appeal. It has a really nice laid back vibe and the bars on the beach get quite lively at night...most put on fire shows and one of the bars had a 'flaming limbo' for the drunk people to burn their
chests and a ring of fire to jump through and burn their legs!! All good fun, health and safety out the window here!
The first morning we woke up in our bungalows and realised there was no water....(only to stumble outside and find a plastic drum full of water)...hmmm...didn't look promising! When I enquired how long they anticipated the water would be out for, they just shrugged. We could have moved places but we gallantly coped for the rest of our time there with bucket showers and got a small discount on the price....I think we were just so chilled we got on with it! Maybe I'm getting better at all this coping-with-the-tough-situations stuff!! So we basically gave ourselves 3 days and nights of chilling and sunbathing in the day and having a nice fish BBQ dinner on the beach followed by a few drinks in the beach bars at night. We also found an awesome Cabaret show with Lady boys that were SO SO beautiful and they had some lovely costumes...they managed to pull some of the western men up from the crowds and dress them up too. I was so relaxed by the time I left Koh
Tao I was almost horizontal...
So after 3 days we left Koh Tao and made our way over to the nearby island of Koh Phangan...kind of known as 'party island' due to its setting for the monthly 'full moon' parties. They came about roughly 10 years ago when a group of people met up for a party on the beach and realised that it was a good place to admire the full moon from the crescent shaped beach of Haad Rin. They met up again for the next full moon and so on...until the party grew and grew and now has between 7,000 and 10,000 people attending every month....We arrived the day before the April full moon party on the 20th so we could have one night to chill out and conserve our energy! We found a lovely place on the North West coast (on the opposite side of the island to Haad Rin) called Dream Hill. It was a cluster of basic bungalows set on a hill overlooking Haad Yao beach but the resort had a swimming pool with the same beach view and a lovely restaurant that had a big TV and sound system so you could
sit and chill out. On the day of the full moon we made sure we had a sleep in the afternoon so that we wouldn't be too tired. We sat in the restaurant at our resort and had a few drinks over dinner. Tri had bought some UV paint so she was busy painting us all with designs on our faces and bodies and made a full design on her leg. We got a taxi over to the beach party at midnight and made our way to buy our first 'bucket' of the evening and got straight on the beach...it was packed. You could hardly move an inch only enough to dance to the various music that was blaring out from the beach bars...there was a real atmosphere but we saw quite a few sights...one girl getting carried off by about 8 men as she was lying face down in the sand completely out of it. The most disgusting sight was seeing mainly men (although a few dirty women too) going to the toilet in the sea...and then people were swimming in it!! We picked up a few people along the way who had lost friends but we all managed
to stay together and we had a meeting point if any of us were to get separated. We carried on (sensibly) drinking buckets and dancing until sunrise when we sat and watched the sky change to all different colours. There are a lot of people who hit it hard at the full moon parties and there are 'after' parties going on all day, but we had enough and were home by 9am, so not too bad. I really loved the experience of the full moon party and I'm glad I went, although I'm not sure I would go out of my way to go again...I've had better nights out and it was really quite crowded at the beginning of the night.
(Some pictures coutesy of Tri - thanks hun!)
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Mum
non-member comment
Buckets and spades
I will never look at the displays of buckets and spades in the same light again! Please don't tell me that the buckets have other useful functions after you have finished drinking from them, you need to preserve an old lady's innocence! loadsa luv, Mum xx