Koh Phangan

We caught the 19.30 night train down from Bangkok to Surat Thani to make our way to Koh Phangan.  We arrived about an hour beforehand so we passed the time playing cards on the floor of the station.  The guy who was sat next to us asked if we would mind his bags for a minute so we obliged.  When he came back we got chatting and found out that he was going to not just the same island, but the same resort (Weangthai Resort) as us!  We forgot to get his name though!

The train arrived around 7 o'clock in the morning and caught a bus to the coast, where we were reunited with our new friend Rick.  It took about an hour to complete the fairly short journey and we were eventually offloaded onto a ferry, which took about 2 1/2 hours to reach Thong Sala in the Southwest of Koh Phangan.  The crossing was quite a pleasant one, as the sea is generally flat all the time in the Gulf of Thailand and the Sun was shining.  (Hollie and Rick even managed to catch the Sun down one side)  Richard and Rick enjoyed a few cans of Leo beer onboard, using them as weights to hold down our cards and we had a good chat.

Rick abstained from being painted but was obliging when it came to painting a two-tone handlebar moustache on Richard!

The ferry docked and we were met by lots of taxi drivers trying to take us to our resort for inflated prices.  We knew the journey was relatively short so we refused to pay 100 Baht each and eventually found someone who took us for 50 Baht each (which we still though was a lot after our 2 minute ride!)  The truck took us away from the sea and it felt as though we were going inland but after we arrived and quizzed the staff on the seaview on the brochure they pointed to the swimming pool and bar, which sat right by the beach!

There was more confusion when we tried to check in and they said "We didn't know you were coming a day early."  As far as we knew we weren't but our guy had made a cock up when he booked it so they weren't expecting us!  The woman offered us her young son's room, which was also a wooden bungalow, but assured us that it was better because it had a hot shower and a TV despite there being 'some' toys in there.  We accepted, although without much other option and they said we could stay there for the whole 6 days to save us moving.  We found the bungalow, which had toys filling half the area of the terrace and went inside to find even more toys, which combined with a big TV covered about half the floor space in the room!  With no real space for our bags we decided to sacrifice the hot shower and try to move to our proper room the next day.  We went back to the reception and asked but were told that we'd have to spend 2 nights in that bungalow because they'd given our one to another guy whose accomodation hadn't been booked at all!  We accepted that and decided to go get a drink!

We spent the afternoon sitting on the beach and watched the sunset, which was a pretty pink one!  We had dinner at the restaurant on site, despite the prices being about 3 times greater than Bangkok (which isn't the cheapest part of Thailand we've been to!) and bumped into Rick who had found a supermarket nearby in the afternoon and suggested we went to buy some beers there to bring back for the pool party later that night.  We stocked up on Changs and found a cheaper restaurant that was about 1/3 cheaper than our resort, where we sat and drank our beers while Rick got something to eat.

The pool party was just about starting when we got back so we consumed our beers, whilst fighting off the tiredness.  We resisted a swim until about 1.15am and after jumping in couldn't figure out why we'd waited so long as it woke us up!  We chatted to lots of the other guests who were staying at the resort and made it to bed at around 3ish.  (Good practice, we thought for the full moon party the following night!)

The next morning we had some breakfast and then jumped back in the pool, where we spent most of the day!  We did manage a trip to the supermarket though to buy a pot of nutella and some bread for our breakfasts over the next couple of days, also acquiring a beach ball and some buckets for a DIY drink before heading to Had Rin for the full moon party!

We met up with Rick in the afternoon and clubbed together to buy some drinks and ice and went back to our bungalow to make up our buckets.  Then we walked along the beach to a sand spit where we walked out to get a better view of the sunset.  After it had gone dark we turned around and noticed the full moon rising above Had Rin as though it were calling us there!

Our taxi journey was a fairly long, bumpy one in the back of the truck and we began to understand why they charged so much for taxis in Koh Phangan!  We arrived in Had Rin and wandered through the streets, stopping for a quick, cheap dinner before making it down to the beach.  We were amazed the number of people there as it was about 9 o'clock and one of the main objectives was to stay up and watch the sunrise in the morning!  We walked around a bit, looking at all the glow in the dark paint tattoos and entertainers with flaming poi and firesticks.  We chose a bar called Mellow Mountain, which was situated high up at the North end of the beach, to have our first drinks and overlook the festivities.

After our first drinks at the beach (plus the buckets beforehand) we were starting to get a bit drunk, so with the sunrise in mind we hung back a bit and took a walk to the other end of the beach, which was much more lively.  There were a few thousand people gathered outside a row of bars that pumped out loud music, turning the beach into a dancefloor.  We bumped into a couple of girls that we'd met whilst trekking out of Chiang Mai, who had been in Koh Tao for a 3 weeks and said they loved it there.  We thought that was pretty good seeing as that was our next destination!  One of them noticed that we didn't have any paint on us and produced a pot from her bag.  She asked Richard what he wanted and he asked for an anchor!  (She did a pretty rubbish job and Richard ended up finishing it off himself!)

After that Richard wanted to play with some bodypaint, but didn't want to pay anyone to do it so we bought a couple of pots and a brush and Richard painted a tribute to his lost flip flops, with R.I.P. underneath.  Hollie later reluctantly allowed Richard to paint a Sun on the top of her arm.  Rick abstained from being painted but was obliging when it came to painting a two-tone handlebar moustache on Richard!

We shared a couple more buckets after that and ended up chatting to a couple of English guys called Drew and Mark.  Mark was pretty drunk so after telling us the same story 14 times he started playfighting with Richard and ended up exhausted face-down on the sand!  Drew (who was surprisingly sober by comparison) thought it was time to take him home, which was annoyingly for them a 30 minute boat trip to Koh Samui.  It was quite funny when we tried to pick Mark up because he refused to move until someone poured some water in his eyes to wash the sand away.  We tried splashing them for him but he carried on refusing until the entire bottle was emptied onto his face!

We're not really sure how the night went so quickly but before we knew it the sunrise was just an hour away, so we picked a good spot and sat down in anticipation.  Richard took this as a good opportunity to have a nap for an hour.  Hollie and Rick sat and chatted and answered everybody who questioned "Is he with you?"  It started to get light and after a struggle Hollie managed to wake Richard up so that he didn't miss out on the sunrise.  The sunrise was quite spectacular as the Sun rose amongst a cluster of clouds, which turned the sky a beautiful shade of orange.

After seeing in the new day we walked into town, passing people that were still dancing and others that were just passed out on the beach.  We got a taxi back to Weangthai and sat outside the bungalow.  The after party had kicked off already in the pool, but we had to move rooms at 10.30 so we decided to get a couple of hours sleep before joining them!

Our new bungalow was much bigger than our first one and had 2 chairs and a hammock outside rather than just a single chair.  We just dumped our bags there before jumping in the pool where we spent the rest of the day!  At about 1pm a few people started to surface and we ended up playing with our beach ball, chucking or skimming it from one end to the other, which resulted in lots of drinks going flying at the pool bar, but no one seemed to mind!  We went for Mexican food that night and went to bed fairly early!

The rest of our time in Koh Phangan was fairly uneventful, apart from exploring Thong Sala, we spent most of our time in or around the pool and alternating between late nights and early nights.  We had one more room change after we discovered that the toilet in our second bungalow didn't flush very well and actually bubbled up through the floor when you tried to!  The third bungalow was much better so no more complaints from us!  On our final day we ventured back out to Had Rin to see what it was like during the day.  The beach was a lot quieter, but so was the whole island which seemed to empty 1 or 2 days after the full moon party.  We wandered around for a couple of hours and grabbed some lunch before heading back over to Thong Sala for the afternoon.  We saw a girl accelerate to quickly on her moped and fall off, fortunately unhurt, but it was quite funny to watch as she picked the bike up and the woman from the rental place came rushing back out (probably just to check the bike though!)  Richard spent some more of his birthday money on a pair of board shorts, so that he can now alternate pairs and stop them being smelly!  We then wandered back to the resort, stopping along the way for Richard to get his haircut for the first time in about 6 weeks and ended up with a real go-faster haircut, as the largest available guard for the hairclippers was a grade 4!  Our last evening was spent making the most of the pool and pool bar!