Thanon Gai (Full Moan Party)

The morning we were due to leave for Ko Phagnan and the “world famous” Full Moon Party, we were up early so I could work out whether my feet were up to me moving. It seemed the antibiotics had worked some magic and I was actually able to walk again and the swelling was noticeably down, so we caught the first Songthaew to the bus station, where we found out we could get a bus and ferry combined ticket to leave soon after. At the bus station I picked up an interesting looking banana parcel for the journey. It turned out to be very sweet fishy coconut stuff and sticky rice.

Fishy coconut

By the time we arrived in Ko Phagnan it was already quite late. The Full Moon Party is on Haad Rin (the beach), and our friend Freya had recommended a smaller less noisy beach, two bays up, called Haad Thien, which she said cost 50 Baht by boat from Haad Rin a couple of years ago. We found the boat taxis and asked how much it would be: 150 Baht if we waited until the boat was full, or 250 Baht per person if we wanted to go straight away. One of the reasons we had wanted to avoid staying away from Haad Rin was to save a bit of money because we expected the accommodation there to be very expensive round about the full moon, however paying 600 Baht return for the two of us was easily going to wipe out any gain in accommodation cost. We left our bags with a friendly Scottish guy working behind one of the bars on Haad Rin and went in search of a room locally.

Walking around Haad Rin town I recognised nothing from my last visit six years previously. I didn't remember there being all that much of a town, just a few restaurants and lots of beach huts, but the place seems to have undergone a period of massive development. And horror of horrors, there are lots of restaurants selling pizza and showing Friends or Family Guy. Just like Vang Vieng. Not a sign that things have developed in the right direction, I thought. We followed a road that should have taken us past some mangroves to the beach hut I stayed in before, but there were no mangroves, only large concrete buildings. The beach huts too, I suspect, have long been bulldozed. Nonetheless we found a reasonably cheap room at 350 Baht and headed back to the beach to get our bags and see what was going on there. I was reassured that there was still plenty of fluorescent art and people playing with fire on the beach, but I was not at all sure that the incredibly ubiquity of the buckets was a good thing.

Ko Phangan "culture"

We spent most of the next day being shocked how expensive everything is on Ko Phangan. When I was there last it was, and as far as I had known it still was, a backpacker-hippie kind of island. Now the prices are generally far above what a backpacker can afford. Transport around the island is ridiculously expensive and, unlike most of Thailand, there is no bartering: prices everywhere are fixed; as in price-fixing and cartels. The internet costs 180 Baht per hour, which is astonishing considering the very expensive Phuket only charges 60 Baht per hour, and the Rough Guide, which was only printed in November last year, said it would be 60 Baht on Ko Phangan too. It's 20 Baht per hour in Bangkok. All the souvenirs were also pricey, as were the food and the beer. Only buckets seemed a sensible purchase. I had read that Phuket was the most expensive place in Thailand but it seems that Ko Phangan has leaped-frogged by some margin in just the last year.

Miles of buckets

Fluoro!

In the early evening we watched them starting to set up for the party: row upon row, hundreds and hundreds, litres and litres of buckets. We left and returned later when we thought things would have got going. What a load of rubbish! Awful Moon Party, more like! I had been expecting lots of hippie types, more interested in dope and magic mushrooms that alcohol, wearing tie-dye, dancing to psychedelic trance and other similarly trippy electronic music, rambling on about crystals and Gaia if they stopped to chat. Instead it has been completely taken over by the mainstream: mindless drunken idiots sprawled all over the beach while hip-hop and other atrocious, not to mention totally inappropriate, boring mainstream music pounded out. Hardly anyone was dancing: almost the entire beach was covered with people sitting down in big groups, drinking buckets through straws.

Lights

No atmosphere at all. In an attempt to recapture the mood, we decided to experiment with a mushroom shake, after all they must be OK if they sell them behind the bar but, wary of warnings about them often being much stronger than people realise, we thought we should just share one. When after nearly an hour we felt nothing different, we decided it was safe to share a second one. Rather than it being so strong that we lost control or something, we still felt absolutely no effect. And they had not been cheap: 500 Baht each, but we had decided it would be worth it for this once-in-a-lifetime experience at the Full Moon Party. In fact it was yet another Ko Phangan rip-off. We re-joined the drunken hoards sitting on the beach, many of them now actually passed out in the sand. When we lost each other among the 30000 for half-an-hour, our already bad moods darkened further and we thought we should call it a night. Leaving the Full Moon Party early?! We should have been up all night; it should have been spiritual, sacred even, but instead it was like the main strip on Tenerife's Playa de las Americas: just a load of vomiting young people on a culture-free package holiday.

View of Haad Rin from "Mushie Mountain"

The next day I gave in and went into one of the internet places to upload some blog. I typed it in advance on the laptop to save some money. The place was almost empty, but the few people that came and left were all on Skype, and literally all of them were apologising for talking such a short time, complaining about the cost of the internet and Ko Phangan in general, and saying that they were leaving the island as soon as possible. I overheard one girl saying “It was fun, but there are just thousands of white people here, so I'm going to leave as soon as I can”.

We thought we'd try an discover the “real” Ko Phangan, starting off with the place Freya had recommended, before making our way north to the non-touristy part of the island, so the next day we gritted our teeth and took the expensive boat to Haad Thien. What a mistake! The beach there was awful: lots of little pebbles rather than sand, which wasn't very nice for Joanne, but my feet were preventing me from going in the water anyway. Everyone on the beach was complaining how expensive the island is, and saying that they would definitely never return to the island, and maybe not again to Thailand. I started to wonder if the drop in tourism the Thais are complaining about isn't actually to do with any political problems or the airport blockade, but in fact down to them having become very greedy and overcharging. To be fair Thailand's islands are still slightly slightly cheaper than Europe and it probably doesn't seem expensive if you are on a short holiday, but one of the great things about Thailand used to be what good value it was; in the Islands it is no longer at all the case.

Commercial Hippie nonsense

Our humble abode in Haad Thien

Haad Thien turned out to be even more expensive that Haad Rin. It was full of “wellness centres”, yoga classes, and ayurvedic massage. Here was the hippie scene I had been looking for, still surviving as a grotesque commercialised pre-packaged theme-park version of what I imagine it once was. Most of the accommodation has a sign up saying that people who are fasting have to pay double the normal room rate. And the whole place was swarming with dengue mosquitoes. I eventually found a reasonably cheap wooden shack (at least they still have the beach huts!) and we headed back down to the beach in search of power for the laptop, since our accommodation had none. In one wellness centre we found power.

Scorpion in the toilet

They seemed to specialise in wheat grass and they had loads of very expensive drinks on the menu for “energizing”, “cleansing”, etc, and a group of Americans at the next table were talking very earnestly about things like energy, nature, and peace until a large insect flew into the restaurant whereupon they all started screaming “Kill it! Kill it!” to the barman. A Scanner Darkly came to mind. When we got back to our place Joanne spotted a very large spider spider in our hut. Despite not paying thousands of Baht to sit around talking about the beauty of nature, I elected not to kill the spider but to sweep it out the hut and off the patio into the forest, while Joanne waited in the restaurant. When we returned we were greeted by a very large cockroach crawling under the door. I flushed that down the hole in the bathroom floor where the shower drains. Later that night I found a scorpion in the toilet, but did not tell Joanne about that. Periodically, throughout the night, what must have been a very large gecko sitting on our roof called out very loudly.

Big spider

Dengue mosquito (note stripes)

In the morning we got ready pretty quickly, so that we would not miss our chance to leave the bay. I noticed that the same spider had found its way back from the forest floor to just above the bed; or else a very similar spider had appeared. Joanne had not noticed it so I made sure I stood in between her and the spider at every opportunity and we got completely packed and ready to leave without her noticing it. The first she will know of it is when she reads this. We caught the boat, which hung around until he had nine people in it, but he still did not lower the per person fare. By this time we had decided not to bother with the north of the island because, even if it is “non-touristy” we were still going to have to pay over the odds to get there and back, and we were both pretty sick of the island anyway. We caught a songthaew towards the port and once we were moving I said to everyone “hands up who'll be coming back to Ko Phangan in the future”, to which the answer was a resounding “no way”. One couple said that they have been travelling all over Thailand and Ko Phangan is the worst place they've been. They had been on Ko Samui previously, which is infamously expensive and over-developed, but they said they had found it much cheaper. How is it that Ko Phangan prices can overtake both Phuket and Samui, which are known for being overpriced, yet the guide books are still describing it as a “backpacker haven”? I hope they set the record straight in the next editions. It's just not for backpackers any more.

Lovely breakfast in Haad Thien

written by

The Happy Couple on May 12, 2009 from Ko Phangan, Thailand

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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