Asia Adventures - Post 11 (Koh Phangan, Thailand)

Although I gripe about the shady characters we met in Thailand, I have to admit it is a beautiful country. We caught a sunset on a private luxurious beach (some fancy hotel’s beach that we reached by climbing over some rocks..security my ass). I could see why people would pay for their privacy because we observed an older man pick up a young Thai boy prostitute.



In order to travel light, I only brought three tank tops, two pairs of shorts, and a dress for the entire trip. Halfway through, I needed to wash my clothes. Thailand was full of little old ladies who would launder tourist’s clothes. The whole gang sent our filthy clothes out. I think this particular lady had a horny teenage son, because all of Olga’s thongs went missing. I have never been so glad to bring only giant comfy cotton underwear (grannys rule).

Another activity big in Thailand is drinking out of a bucket. Okay that sounds primeval, but it tastes delicious. You mix a can of red bull with a can of sprite (or coke classic) with 1/3 liter of bad Thai moonshine. All of this goes into a bucket with a handful of straws. You cart around your bucket and sip it all night. One of those will get you buzzed for the night. Two…well, lights out. Evan said about the bucket “it is fermented in my mouth.”

The restaurants (picnic tables on the beach) showed movies nightly. The movies were all in English…with subtitles in Thai…and sometimes subtitles in English too. It was funny because you could tell the movie distributer who had a cousin who could translate English into Thai and then that cousin had a friend who could translate Thai to English. The English subtitles did not match the spoken English because there was no Thai word for the English slang, so when you translate it back into English, the sentence was different. My favorite was during Kung Fu Panda. At one point some character said to the Panda, “what are you going to do, SIT on me?”, well the translation was “what are you going to do, SHIT on me?”.

One of our main reasons for visiting Koh Phangan was the infamous moon parties. The full moon parties are 10,000 people strong packed on a single beach, rocking out to several DJ’s and various other entertainment. The half moon parties are similar, except there are only about 3,000 people and it is held in the middle of the jungle. We grabbed our buckets and hopped on the taxi (which was nothing more than a pickup truck bed crammed with a dozen other tourists) for the half moon party. The party was everything you would expect from a rage, blasting DJ’s, fluorescent paint, strange drinks, and a FIRE DANCER!






Some geeky guy built up some liquid courage and tried to hit on one of the girls in our group. After he went down in flames Evan remarked, “you’ve got to punch your own weight class”. Ah ha ha ha, so true.

We were a couple of hours shy of dawn, and decided to call it a night. The taxis insisted on only taking full loads (full meaning everyone on a lap and a few lying down). While waiting in the truck bed for more party goers to filter out, we got to observe people who enjoyed themselves too much. Every puker was given a chorus of “oooohhh” and applause.

And now, pictures.
The beautiful beaches



Roosters right outside our window...nesting in a tree...in a TREE, WTF!