Full moon party and Thai boxing class...

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It is currently 09.30am in Koh Tao and I have just completed my first 1 hour thai boxing class and I have the feeling that I will be aching by about 10:30am!!?! Now I have to be honest I have been so lazy on this trip. I know I only go to the gym once or twice a week at home, but I have really noticed the effects of little exercise, lots of alcohol and so excellent thai food, so signed myself up for 3 sessions of thai boxing to end my trip. I had my first one this morning up in sair rai village. My instructor Steve was great and also very patient with me. I had to get myself into some rather strange positions and had to be spun around on one leg as my warm up. We started the one on one session with 10 minutes of the SKIPPING rope. All sorts of childhood horrors came flooding back.. Fortunately I managed to get my rhythm, but was soon realsing that training in my nice air conditioned gym at Stockely Park was not to be the same as training in an outdoors gym in southeast asia!! Nevertheless it was Excellent! they do the full works strapping your hands up to protect your knuckles and the ankle supports with foot protectors. Excellent value for money too, at only 4GBP per session, please all now beware, I am trained in Muay Thai - well an hour atleast...

So I am sure you were all thinking that I would be starting this blog with a full run down on my wild part under the full moon at Koh pnag gnag - sadly not!!?! A friend once told me that "you should only regret the things you haven't done, never regret anything that you gave a try" I am having sadly to say this too myself several times since fininshing at the full moon party. For those of you who know, my trip has been pretty much planned around the full moon party dates ensuring that I would be somewhere near koh pnag gnag near the 10th March. When I was first in Thailand my plan was to stay on the island aswell. The more I got talking to people the more it seemed that staying there was really not entirely the holiday that I would be looking for - especially being on my own! I therfore decided to stay on a nearby island and do the short hop across. I boarded the party boat from Mae hat, given my complimentary bottle of singha and then done the "short" hop across (short in Thai meaning 2.5 hours ferry journey). I met up with a couple of Irish girls who were well up for a good party too, so we docked and went and found somehwere to eat and hit the nearest 7/11 supermarket (I also found out that the 7 is for 7days a week and the 11 is for 11 hours a day - still did not answer my question why they were open 24 hours a day). Too eager to get to the party we headed staright for Had rin beach. The beach by this time 9pm was failry busy, but I I was surpirsed that there was 35,000 people at Asia largest party. We decided that we were unfashionably early and went and found ourselves an Irish bar and had a few warm up drinks and purchased some body paint (pictures to follow) and proceeded to paint ourselves up. Fortunatley one of the Irish girls was not drinking, so some of the boady art was atleast recognisable... at around 1am we decided to head back to Had Rin beach. Having heard LOTS of horror stories about the things that go on at Had rin during Full moon, I made sure that I had stayed reasonably sober and had pre-warned my new friends about some of the things to watch out for... I'm not sure that I could of been prepared for the sight down at the beach, it was INCREDIBLE tons of people partying to electro music under the full moon and the stars, I was amazed and really impressed and wondered what all the unnesseccary fuss was about. Wanting to try and take it all in (we had just come from a reasonably quiet Irish bar to pumping electric house music) we deicded to plonk oursleves on the beach. Now I am sure that we were probably just in the wrong spoot at the wrong time, but it suddendly started to dawn on me that there was more than just a "party" atmostphere that was happening on Had Riin and the first thing we had to contend with was a fight breaking out in front of us, not such a nice sight to start your full moon experience on. This soon died down, but before we knew it a rather large guy had passed out cold on the beach, I was obviously very concenred by this stage as his rather drunk mate was somewhat out of it! As I looked closer I realised that this was happening all around, people passed out then assisted by the thai red cross by being placed in the recovery positionand then left to sleep off their affects of "whatever" they had had. The police searches at the start of Had Riin had done little to stop the amount of drugs that I was offered. I wish I had invested in a t-shirt "no drugs thankyou". We decided that we would sit about a bit before we we start our party in one of the clubs up near the paradise.

We carried on on the beach for about an hour before everything would really start to go down hill! Lucy - the non drinking friend, was laying back on her bag, she lifted her head to tell us something, when her bag was snatched away from her. It was literally a side wards glance and it was gone. In hindsight my next few actions were VERY stupid and I have already explained it all to my mother so that she would not be in shock reading this blog. I have been taught alot in my training recently but the MOST important thing I have been taught is to think about my own safety at all times. Obviously that all went out the window in the the next 60 seconds. As my firend said that her bag had been snacthed I immediately turned arond and seen the thai guy running away with the bag down the beach. I immeditale on impulse chased after the guy - stupid I know. I tried to as loudly as I could, shouting to let people in front of me know that I was chasing this guy for the bag. It appeared that this didn't intially help me very much as our thieveing friend obvioulsy was not alone and I proceeded to be blocked by thais from all angles. I think a bit of Offcer safety paid off and I managed to push past the two guys blocking me and managed to grab the bag from the thief! I turned around and for a split second wasn't quite sure where I was at, I eventually saw my friends and took the bag back to them. In hindsight I know what I did was VERY stupid! I have had to have my guard up for the last 4 weeks protecting my own belongings and my own saftey but yet I was prepare to compromise all that for someone elses bag! I now realise that I was VERY stupid, but also I am glad that I could retrieve the bag.. money, banks card, phones etc could be replaced, but things likes cameras, pictures and memeories can't!?! So the rest of my full moon party was spent in a bar near the pier watching the Liverpool football match and on the phone to Lyndsay!! We done the slow journey back to Koh Tao and I spent the rest of the day in bed. For the afternoon I decided that my body needed some pampering so I opted for a Aloe Vera body massage, on the beach, which was incredible!

I forgot to mention on Monday evening I decided to go to a Lady boy show in town at the Queens Cabarat. As I frequent the gay scene somewhat I am used to drag queens etc, but I was surpised that the lady boys shows are taken very seriously and there is no real heckling that goes on at these shows, it reminded me of Un-humours drag meets euroviosion - I'm glad I went but I am not sure I will go back again...

So I'm off to the beach now to make a dent in my new book and to start working on my return tan to make you all jealous. I would just like to ocnfirm it is 10:14am and the aches are setting in!!...
😊 xx

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