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Published: January 7th 2008
Sloppy Xmas and Messy New Year to you all. I hope everyone has had a wonderful festive season, eaten amounts i would be proud of, drunk amounts Dickie would be proud of, partied for long enough to put Elly to shame and spoke enough jibberish to rival the turk! Now just let me reassure you if you think i have the better deal, being here in a sun-filled paradise and all, i have really missed all my family and friends and would have much rather been back in England with all of you (for one week only!).
I think the last time i wrote i was on the verge of leaving Laos and deciding where to spend my xmas and NYE. After months of thinking i should do something different and not head to Ko Pha Nagn i decided to go to Ko Pha Nagn. Was this wise? I'm still not sure. But firstly i had to get there! But to quickly repeat early comments... Laos is awesome!
One advantage of the Ko Pha Nagn option was the necessity to travel through Bangkok allowing me to purchase a lovely new Digital Camera - Fujifilm Finepix - F50 fd. The all too obvious disadvantage of this was needing to spend another day in Bangkok. Literally as soon as Vic and I stepped off the bus near the Kao Shan Road we were hit with both barrels, tuk-tuk drivers invading your space and the smell, i hadn't noticed it before, but Bangkok really stinks... like it's rotting... but somehow within 15 mintues it becomes background smell... ! After Laos Bangkok was like a fight with a Rottweiller. But Vic and myself purchased cameras (Vic and me have similar luck though.....?), i had a lovely Chicken Heart sandwich (i estimate at least 20 chickens died so i could break fast that day!) and we got the hell out within a day. (Note - Chicken's Hearts are tastier than Chicken's Feet!!).
Another Bus Journey... after an allnighter from Vang Vieng to Bangkok (watched the animated film Ratatouille - about a Chef who's a rat - quite pleasant) another allnighter was pulled from Bangkok to Surat Thani. This one was a little more eventful due to the theiving bastards who went through everyone's bags while we slept. This is a common enough scam in Thailand and as such we knew not to leave valuables in our rucksacks. Others were not forsighted and lost their stash of safe/emergency/rainy day money. Vic though even had her handbag taken from under her seat, rummaged through, and lost 5,000 baht (approx 66 baht to the pound at the moment!) so be careful...very careful.... The tour company was very good at quickly shipping people off in tuk-tuks to various bus stations and pick-up points before you had a chance to notice that you had been robbed. By which point all "seems" too late. I say "seems" as one particularly indignant Scandanavian guy demanded to have the tourist police called, went off in to the police office, and was eventually driven to the bus company and given all his money back, after a couple of internediary offers. While this is in some ways reassuring, the police playing Deal of No Deal between thieving tour operators and victims of crime is not!
An uneventful boat ride later i arrived on Ko Pha Nagn... on Xmas Eve... luckily finding a room wasn't as difficult though we could only get a room on Lang Soem beach on the North of the Island far away from Party Central in Haad Rin... in retrospect this wasn't a bad thing. Xmas Eve in Ko Pha Nagn was great. I found Jay and Ric+h from Laos on the beach (another of the advantages of coming to Ko Pha Nagn), met Luke and Amy (a Northen "couple" and ongoing Soap Opera - which Jay may yet feature in!) and a whole host of other randoms! Faces were UV painted, Sang-Som buckets were drunk, sand was danced upon, fire displays were er.. displayed, and surprisingly good music was badly mixed... All in a great night. My hopes were raised, Ko Pha Nagn was better then i'd hoped for and the following week was going to be awesome... right??
In reality Ko Pha Nagn got boring... It's an island i feel with little charm... and little to do except drink and party.... though maybe i didn't really look hard enough for non-drink related activities. The second night out was great fun, the third was good, by the fourth my liver was screaming at me and i missed the pool party and jungle party's the following nights... The drinking may have been some of the problem with the enjoyment. A typical bucket contains half a litre of spirits. Some nights i drunk at least 3 of these to myself plus beer. What would normally reduce a man to a curled wreck on the beach though is tempered by the Thai Red Bull. Rocket Fuel to keep to drinking. But boy do the hangovers add up.
The resort where Vic and I stayed was nice. Bamboo Nipa Bungalows. On quiet, peaceful and often almost deserted Lang Soem beach. But be warned. Vic stayed for a couple of nights after i left to come to Tonsai and was the only person left. The owner Chai eventually offered Vic the opportunity to "pay-off" the rest of her bill!!!! Whether this is typical of Chai or of Vic's luck i'm unsure! Vic is the Canadian girl who i mentioned in my last blog who was my roommate up until 4 days ago when our paths went in different directions. A fun outgoing girl who has an amazing aptitude for ending up in strange situations!
Her last trip to Ko Pha Nagn saw her get arrested for defending herself against an aggressive male. That one got sorted out in the end but not until after a brief stint in the local police cell and an altercation with a fellow "convict"! Another night saw her drinking with a couple of Laos/Thai guys outside their bungalow until their wife came out, saw them with a young blonde westerner, went mental and pushed Vic and her husband down some stairs. Vic suffered a minor cut on her colarbone. Husband cracked his head open! That was apparantly all the more surreal as they all ended up in the same cab to the hospital! Hell we met by playfighting with each other! lol
Despite this she isn't actually a butch brawler but more a short, ex ballet dancer and generally nice gentle girl. Likes her drink though, and likes to playfight too.. needless to say we got along greatly!....even though i had to deal with Jay and Rich not really liking her at all... which was a bit of a pain in the ass.... though they warmed to her a little once they met the more sober chilled side of her personality. She's heading to Bangkok to teach English and i may go and say hello if my travels take me that way.
NYE felt like a bit of an anti-climmax. 30,000 people partied on the beach in Ko Pha Nagn, i was one of them, it was ok... It absolutely pissed it down and the power cut out for an hour. But it felt like a repeat of Xmas Eve really with a few more people around. I think by this point i had got bored of the drinking, bored of the people who were really excited about the drinking, and was yearning to be back on the backpacker trail rather than surrounded by people who had decided to "have it large for NYE". Ended up feeling like there were too many tourists trying to look good. But good random times were had in Ko Pha Nagn. Lots of crazy drunken nights out with Jay and Rich, cosy quiet days in with Vic, waking up next to a naked Richard!, Jay spearing a random reveller in the surf on Haad Rin beach, people dancing with dead fish, near misses with Fireworks, swimming in a virtually deserted bay with Vic, watching Luke unknowingly dancing around with a big flouresant purple phalus drawn on his back, the most long-winded taxi journey ever coupled with the most annoying taxi companion ever (aussie), dancing, drinking and debauchery. It was fun... but i'm glad to be away from there.
The journey off Ko Pha Nagn was an experience... the weather wasn't great when we departed the port in Thong Sala... steadily getting worse en route to Surat Thani.. waves increasing in size... and our two tier boat rollling and rolling. Looking out of the windows and seeing sea coming towards you as you slide down waves has a way of unsettling people. As did Amy's piercing scream after one particulalrly large wave. After that everyone started sticking life-jackets on... though what good a life-jacket does when you're inside a sinking ship i still haven't worked out. Thankfully though we made it, people talked about it being the "worst crossing they'd done in 50 trips" and we all wished someone had prematurely jumped overboard when a big wave had hit us! That would have been funny!!! But apparantly you have to have at least 2 near death experiences when travelling through Asia... so i'll gladly take this as one of mine!
On the negative side though... the LCD screen of my 10 day old, and rather sexy and sophisticated Finepix F50 managed to break on the way over. I am still a little miffed at exactly how that managed to happen. Though i am more than a little relieved as i have literally just had an email confirming that my camera has not been lost in the post, has arrived in Bangkok, and will be fixed by some lovely little man very shortly, hopefully in time to get some photos of lovely Tonsai (where i am now - and i believe Emily's favourite place of her travels). The camera by the way is great.... highly recommended....
Anyway... big love to all.... have you missed you all loads over the past week or two.... big love x x x x
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Jules
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Missing you too Mr Wes. Please try not to come back an alcoholic..... I think we'd better put you on the organ donation list now!