New Years Eve on Haad Rin Beach

---

After leaving Railey we spent a couple of nights in Krabi town trying to figure out what to do next. We knew we wanted to spend New Years Eve on Haad Rin beach on Ko Pha Ngan but we had lost our accomodation that we had arranged and after a quick look at guesthouses we soon realised it was a lost cause, the island was full.

Our only other alternative to make the New Year celebrations was to stay on neighbouring island, Ko Samui and get a boat across to Haad Rin, stay up partying all night then come back the following morning. Being our best bet we left Krabi for Ko Samui and found a guest house on a beach called Bo Phut. Bo Phut is a small beachside town and the tourist area is called Fishermans Village, it was quite a pretty place but is very geared up for tourists with the main street lined with expensive restaurants, tailors and shops selling fake Havaiannas.

The owner of our guesthouse was very accomodating and agreed to let us stay the night, check out on New Years Eve but leave our bags in her living room, and them come back early on New Years day to check back in and crash out.

So after explaining our plans to our land lady we dropped off our bags and went for something to eat, we'd managed to have some rice dish before we got on the boat to Ko Samui but Lil had discovered a fully grown dead wasp amongst her veg so hadn't had much of an appetite after that. We had to take a little walk out of the Fishermans Village to find a restaurant we could afford, we had some Pad Thai and then went back to our guesthouse for a good nights sleep in preparation for the following days events.

New Years Eve morning we got up early and got ready for an all day, all night extravaganza. As we were about to leave, we opened the door and found it was absolutely throwing it down, it was rainy season on this part of Thailand after all and it seemed New Years Eve was no exception. We decided to do a mad dash to the main street and invested in two brightly coloured ponchos, problem solved. We checked out and waved goodbye to our land lady as we skipped down the street in the pouring rain like two blue and green teletubbies.

We had booked our boat to Haad Rin the previous day and it was due to leave at 1.30pm, we were amongst many other party goers and it seemed there was a bit of a backlog of people trying to get across to the island so it was around 4.30pm by the time we left. The boat ride across was on a speed boat and the driver was in a hurry, the waves were quite high and at times it really felt like the boat was going to tip over. We did make it across alive, and as we got off the boat started walking into Haad Rin village we could feel a great vibe, people were darting around energetically preparing for what was to be the biggest party of the year.

We had some friends who were staying on the island that we had arranged to meet up with later on, so we grabbed some food and then made our way down to the famous Haad Rin Beach to take a look before it filled up with people and the destruction began. It didn't make for a great postcard because the weather was still quite drizzley and there was quite a lot of litter around, probably from the previous nights party, but we have seen pictures of it looking beautiful with pristine water and lovely white sand.

The rain started coming down in showers so we bought our first bucket of the day, put our ponchos on and sat on the beach. There aren't any bars on the beach, alcohol is sold from little make-shift stalls selling buckets which are about the size of someones head and are filled with one small bottle of spirit, coke and Thailands version of redbull which looks more like medicine than an energy drink; all sloshed together with ice and a few straws, lovely.

Once the sun had gone down and the night set in the beach started to get really full and busy, we'd had a couple of buckets by now and were starting to get excited. We finally met up with our friends Olly and Lotty after a lot of confusion; we don't have a mobile phone so trying to meet someone on a beach full of 30,000 people is quite difficult. We headed back down to the beach which was now difficult to walk along because of all the people, everyone was rushing around, buying drinks and decorating themselves with illuminous objects. There were Thai people amongst the crowds selling glow in the dark tattoos, illuminous jewellery, a man even came over and put a lizard on Olly's head and then asked for 50 baht for a photo. We bought ourselves some glow in the dark glasses and loads of illuminous paint and sat in the sand for a while drinking our buckets and painting eachother.

When it was nearly midnight we made our way to the part of the beach that had a huge countdown, at 12 o'clock everyone went crazy, a huge sign lit up with flames reading 'Happy New Year 2009', fireworks went off all the way along the beach and there were people standing on raised platforms spinning ropes of fire. We saw in the new year covered in glow in the dark paint and wasted on buckets. After much celebrating and dancing, we moved away from the main area of the beach towards one side where there's a bar on top of a hill called 'mushroom mountain' where they sell magic mushroom milkshakes. It's also a good place to chill out for a few hours and has a great view of Haad Rin beach all lit up.

A few hours later Olly and Lotty decided to call it a night, as their accomodation was on the island they had the option of going to bed. They offered us the spare bed in their room but we decided to stick it out. After they left we went back to the centre of the beach and moved around the crowds which were now full of raving zombies rather than drunkern loons, the music all the way down the beach was hard house which was fun for a while but we'd heard there were other places along the beach that played pop and rock so we went in search of this. We spotted a bar right at the opposite side of the beach called 'Rock Bar' in the hope that this meant it played rock music we fought our way through the ravers to get across to it. We finally made it through only to be disappointed, it played hard house.

We were right at the end of the beach now and there were some big rocks just near the waters edge so we decided to have another break from the crowd and sat down. We spent the next 3 hours on that rock talking mostly about how much we loved South America, the next thing we knew the sun had started to rise. When it was quite light we headed back to the beach which was still in full flow, music blaring and people dancing with buckets in their hands, it was 7.30am. It was a really cool atmosphere seeing the first light hitting hardcore revellers, still drunk and covered in paint ourselves for a while we got back in the mood. It wasn't too long though until we decided enough was enough and went to get a boat.

The boat back to Ko Samui was full of people like ourselves looking very worse for wear, we got back to Bo Phut and on the way back to our guesthouse we stopped at a pub called the Lord Nelson and had poached eggs on toach with HP sauce. Beautiful. We got back to our room at 10am and went to bed. The only time we got up on New Years Day was to have dinner which was also at the Lord Nelson pub and consisted of bangers and mash with peas and gravy, the best medicine.

The next day we packed our bags and headed back to the mainland, destination Bangkok.

---