For those of you who don’t know, the Full Moon Party is a party on Haad Rin beach on the island of Koh Phangan. It hosts about 30,000 people on the full moon every month. To put that into perspective, only 12,000 people actually live on this island. If you’re young and in Thailand, there is no way you are going to miss this party.
We stayed about 20 minutes away from Haad Rin in an attempt to avoid all the noise but we all know how much fun I had there! We taxi’d to the party at about 10pm that night and walked into complete chaos.
I’m not much of a partier nor a drinker so this is quite out of my element. In all honesty, if it wasn’t for B, I wouldn’t have even gone to this but I am glad I did. It was the first time I actually had fun on this island! Within about 6 minutes of arriving, we encountered this guy:
Body paint and neon are the sole requirement for dress here – shoes definitely not needed as shown by this flip flop graveyard.
There was food galore and endless supplies of alcohol. Most of the alcohol is served in buckets which include a mickey of alcohol, a can of your desired soda and usually a Red Bull. The Red Bull here though has ephedrine in it, which we were told by a Canadian fire fighter we met later in the evening, which makes you feel like your heart is going to explode. B learned this after consuming her bucket of red bull, vodka and coke but luckily didn’t have any adverse effects other than a case of beer goggles.
The beach was littered with people so thick it was like a full pickle jar when you want that one on the bottom. The beach was lined with bars, each one hosting a different DJ and type of music. You just walked down the beach and stopped for an impromptu dance party whenever you felt the urge.
My four favourite parts of the night are as follows:
First up, the Fire Slide. It is impossible to take good photos in this light so I apologize for the shit quality. This was a giant spider net rope ladder that led up to a platform that housed a big ass slide with water pouring down it. Now, in North America they might have something like this but there would be some sort of safety barricade and there most certainly wouldn’t be pillars of fire on either side. Every time someone would come down, since the slide was wet and so was the pad that you land on at the bottom, the people would FLY off the end and into a crowd of people walking by unknowingly. We stood for some time and watched people get taken out at the knees over and over.
Second up, the Fire Jump Rope. You don’t have to be a trained professional to use this insane jump rope about 20 feet long and lined with flames, you just have to be drunk enough. We watched time and time again as drunken MEN jumped in only to be immediately hit by the rope and then catch on fire themselves (I guess we women aren’t dumb enough to do this.) And to make matters worse, the Thai people running it did nothing to make it safer. In fact, if you happened to perform a miracle and jump the rope successfully, they would just start swinging it faster and faster until only Flash Gordon could triumph.
Third up, when we got back to our hostel at about 4am, we had a 2 minute walk to our door. In that time, a stray dog came up to B. She bent down to say hello to it, “SAAAA WAAAAA DEEE KAAAA PUPPY!” That must be the secret call because it was mere seconds before suddenly there were 5 dogs around her fighting each other for turf. We booked it back to our hostel while I repeated, “Stay calm, they can sense your fear.”
And fourth up... This guy.
S.
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