Koh Phangan — the party island

The boat left the three of us at the pier in Thong Sala. From there we had a short 15 min walk to our hostel. The most expensive hostel of our whole trip — almost 30€ per person for one night. But it was for a good reason, it was the night of the famous full moon party and the island was buzzing with anticipation.

After having dinner in a food court near the hostel, Tavares and Jorge took a nap and later when to get some drinks for pre-gaming, all while I was trying to sort the paperwork for my Indian visa application.

With everything almost ready (I was still finishing the last steps of my application...), we took what we thought was a taxi organised by the hostel to Haad Rin. Midway through our driver started apologising, saying that he couldn't take us further because there was police up ahead. Why was that a problem? We never found out. Profusely apologetic, he turned around and dropped us at a 7-eleven where another car picked us up a few minutes later.

The second car finally dropped us at the party. It was pouring. We took cover from the rain in a 7-eleven and used the opportunity to get some extra drinks. At some point we did the bro table chanting and a couple of American girls, intrigued by it, striked conversation .

I don't remember much about them other than the fact that they were californians and friends from high-school but the tall brunette was insufferable whilst her blond friend and actually quite interesting. She was close to getting her licence to be a boat captain and told me a bit about whale watching in the US. What a cool job to have! She also had nice blue eyes.

We entered the full moon party together, but the brunette went to buy a donnut (how American...) while we were too excited to join a drum n' bass bar we heard at a distance and so that's how we lost the girls in the crowd for ever. The drum n' bass was a great worm up but after awhile we were back on the beach, strolling alongside the sea, absorbing the ligh shows, the fluorescent paintings and the different music genres. They had these buckets for sale half full of ice with a few bottles of diferent drinks inside. Once bought, they'd just open the bottles and flip the contents into the bucket making a cocktail. We all thought it was brilliant — it's transparent, you can see clearly what drinks you're getting, but also keeps the beach glass free for us to dance barefoot. After the second or third bucket things started to get blurry.

I wrote to Tiphane explaining where we were, in front of a big billboard saying "cr7gold". Maybe it was a reference to Ronaldo?

At this point we were on fire, dancing at the beach and meeting lots of random people. Marta, a girl we briefly hung out with in the canyon in Pai, found us and brought her group of friends to join us. But we were too far gone, erratically moving to the sound of different DJs, and soon lost them as well. We crossed paths with a couple of British girls we had met at the timeless hostel back in Koh Samui, I only remember not understanding a word of what they said. We quickly lost them as well.

Finally Tiphaine and Sofiene found us. We danced and drank, but at some point Sofiene left and we never found him again. It was around this time that I realised I had lost my phone and couldn't remember where I had left my new balance sneakers. I never saw either again.

Still, that didn't deter me from enjoying the party. The rest of the night was a blur of me, Tavares, Jorge and Tiphane dancing non stop. I jumped on the fire rope, Jorge found a fluorescent mask, Tavares climbed on top of a big sign saying "full moon party" and we all danced on top of multiple platforms. It was a lot of fun.

Close to the end it downed on me how expensive that party had been, having lost a phone and my shoes. Jorge also lost his shoes, and I found out later that so did Sofiene.

We found our way back to the hostel, me and Jorge barefoot, and in the afternoon of the next day we slowly dragged ourselves back to Koh Samui.Read more