Full Moon Party: 10,000 people, 1 Beach, Lots of Fire

This was it. The culmination of my time in South East Asia. As I reflected back on the two and a half months that I spent in one of the most volatile, beautiful and memorable places that I'd ever been, I couldn't help but be find my train of thought frequently derailing before it made it anywhere near the station.

I was surrounded by people.

Lots of people.

Thousands upon thousands of people.

Oh, and I'd been drinking. Quite a bit.

Yes, welcome to the Full Moon Party (or FMP as I will shorten it to from now on to save you, oh precious reader, valuable moments and my nimble fingers further suffering) where the drugs flow like wine, the beer flows like beer and there are enough things on fire to create a massive hole in the ozone layer, right above our humble beach.

I had arrived on Ko Phagnagn that afternoon, having just completed my PADI Open water scuba diving course. Since it is not particularly interesting to discuss things best left to pictures (see Japan posts upcoming) I won't take up too much of your time. Suffice it to say that there is much more SCUBA diving in my future. Any activity where the people who are considered the best are the ones who move the least, breath the slowest and are inherently the most relaxed is the kind of activity for me. Oh, and the sharks make it moderately interesting as well.

The history of the FMP deserves a moment of recognition here. The island that it is held on used to be a kind of hippies hideaway. It wasn't easy to get to, once you were there, you tended to stay, and any behavior that you could think of was groovy by the rest of the residents. Then, each month, a kind of pilgrimmage to the island would occur, with only the stoutest of souls and the bravest of travelers making the trip out to an island that would be consumed with madness, a fitting tribute to a sacred time of the month.

Times have changed.

As the world has gotten smaller (and flatter...according to Mr. Friedman) the fabled monthly parties in the south of Thailand went from rumor to legend to...pretty much a well controlled party. Each month, thousands of dreadlocked, tattoo'ed and baggy-pantsed young travelers, their eyes bright from excitement and ecstasy, descend on the small town on Ko Phagnagn to participate in a ritual that has moved from being the worlds craziest party to "The Worlds Craziest Party© " Becoming a victim of your own success is not exactly a new concept, and as any number of tourist ghettos can attest, what once was unique and interesting can develop into "Unique and Interesting" within a few short years (see: Cancun, Cozumel, Goa, anyplace in Florida, Cape Town etc.). Nonetheless, how could I pass up something this popular, this talked about, this essential to a trip to South East Asia?

Of course, if it had only been for the party, I may have found my motivations lacking and my will to participate ebbing slowly away with every minute that I spent submerged in saccharine blue ocean, salt water gently corroding the contact lenses from my eyes. No, there were a few other, more pressing reasons for my attendance...


(L to R) Lorraine, Aidan, Claire, Intrepid Hero, Tanja, Ghost of Christmas Past (not pictured)





Those reasons had names, and they were: Claire, Tanja, Aidan, and Lorraine. As I've made reference to in the past few months, there is a kind of well worn backpackers trail that leads one through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. It could perhaps be just as accurately characterized as a rut if one were so inclined, which I assuredly am not. If it be a rut, then a most pleasant one it is. Still, throughout my travels in this region, I found myself nearly every night with these most excellent of individuals. We had laughed together, and drank together, experienced awesome and amazing sights together, and drank together, gone sailing and kayaking together, and drank together, and experienced hellacious bus rides and beautific boat rides together. And drank together. Now, here, at the end of all things, we would wile away our last few hours taking in the made-for-backpackers experience of the Full Moon Party. The brilliant flashing lights, the deep booming that seemed to shake the sands beneath our feet like the tremors that had broken them down from mountains in eons past, the buckets full of disgusting Thai whiskey out of which every single person on the beach was guzzling.


Lorraine makes friends easily...actually, given where her hand is, maybe TOO easily...








Tanja is full of surprises...not the least of which is that I had a bloodsucking leech on my face that she had to bite it off...thats totally what is going on here.






Truth be told, it is difficult to make a real friend on the road. "Friends" come fast and thick, and it is a rare traveler who has not exhausted the capacity of their notebook and the ink of their pen trying to keep up with all the e-mail addresses that thrusting yourself into the ether of travel loneliness necessitates. But these rarely are people with whom you share anything real. You don't know them long enough to find out something that you don't like about them. You don't see them cry. You don't learn about their families and their future and what they hope for themselves. These kinds of relationships are elusive at best, nigh on impossible at worst to establish when one decides to be in a different country nearly every week. Yet slowly, and improbably, Tanja, Claire, Aidan, Lorraine, Pieter and Mathijs (last two couldn't make it to the island) ended up becoming not "friends", but friends. It is a fact that I will be eternally grateful for.

But enough of my blather, on to the party.

Here's a quick summary of what you can expect from a FMP:

You will arrive on the island, to find that the boat has left you approximately 45 minutes by tuk tuk from Hat-rin, the beach where the magic happens. Trying to negotiate will leave you ultimately unfulfilled as the walk to the beach is nearly 3 hours and the drivers know this and will not hesitate to let you know it. One annoyingly pricey cab ride later, you find yourself in downtown...ummm...town and begin to see how the party is going to go down. The streets are narrow and, while not cobbled, they do seem to have a sort of routine paving scheme going on. On every corner, and also inbetween every corner, an industrious Thai person has set up a folding table with plastic buckets, stuffed full of 1. ice 2. a fifth of either Thai whiskey, vodka or gin and 3. the appropriate beverage to accompany the prior two items. The buckets sell for a very reasonable 3-5 dollars a piece, and they seem to be the only acceptable form of libation during the evening.

It should be noted that I had arrived far in advance of the festivities. It is a well known and bragged about fact that the FMP really "gets going" around 2am and revelers can be found at the "secret" (ahem) after-party that starts around 10am. So with time to kill, I set off to find my erstwhile companions.

It was not difficult.

Be it due to some cosmic interference, a telepathic connection or simply good planning, the whole group, despite traveling as three separate units at all times (Claire/Tanja, Aidan/Lorraine, Norm) always managed to bump into each other nearly immediately after arriving in a place. I have no hypotheis as to why this occurred save that I am just a center of gravity for awesome [severe beating of Norman by super-ego....back to the narrative].

We ate food, lounged around, and come midnight, we set off at a leisurely stroll to the beach. Let me see if I can find a suitable analogy to what the beach looked like from our spot at the top of the street looking down...

If you were to pull the ground up over an anthill, then grab two different colored flashlights, pour crazy-ant-alcohol all over the ants and then watch them dance around for a while, you might be getting there...

If you somehow managed to herd a huge group of cats into an auditorium of which you kept reducing the size, while playing a thumping back beat that drove the cats nuts and into one corner of the auditorium, shivering in fear and anticipation, you might be close...

If you were to watch a riot developing in a city, from a helicopter above (but not TOO high above) that city, you would be spot on.


This was perhaps 1/100th of the beach






There was fire. There was dancing. There was movement that was less dancing and more...well..animal than anything else. There were people selling drugs, at least half of whom were undercover police officers trying to make a few quick bucks with an arrest and a bribe. As we descended to the beach, the chaos became more visceral. Though I'm not great with numbers, I would say with confidence that there were at least 8,000 people packed onto a beach the size of several football fields. I had imagined that the FMP would be one cohesive unit, everyone throbbing and stomping and rotating to the same beat. It was not so. Clearly the beachfront was prime real estate for any enterprising entrepeneur who chose to cash in on the popularity of the event. As such, the 20 or so bars lining the whole beach have taken to gouging each other, in price, in music selection, and most importantly, in music volume, to turn profits on the excited freaky dancers. Thus, walking 30 feet in either direction from the dead center of any bar was akin to walking behind a jet engine as it is firing up. Somewhat disorienting.

Adding to the confusion was the fact that despite everyone trying to look different from each other, the looks all kind of blended in the wash. Thai fishing pants (baggy colorful pants that tie in the back), flowing, billowy shirts, long ratty dreadlocks and the dreaded fire pois (about which more in a moment) flooded the beach and made the outside of each bar as similar as the one before it. This did not lend itself to catching back up with ones friends once they had been lost.



They have such nice smiles, I really can't think of anything snarky to say...bollocks






Dancing my way around from bar to bar, I found myself being exceptionally thankful that I had violated one of my own sacred maxims and kept my sandals on for the fracas. The beach was, in a word, vile. When not chugging from a bucket, beer was dispensed in large bottles, many of which ended up deposited on the beach half full,then broken. As the tide receded, drunken partyers chose to forgo the traditional methods of relieving themselves for the (apparently) more attractive option of using the ocean. Though this may be acceptable for the variegated organisms that inhabit our watery depths, that effluent washing back up on the shores, all night, in not insubstantial quantities, made for a rather pungent aroma.

A note on the poi's. I have mentioned fire as being a rather large part of the festivities and I wish to elaborate a bit on this point. It would seem, from my completely curosry and not-at-all-thorough investigation of fire-spinning, that it originated as kind of martial art of particular daring. A poi is a relatively simple object. It is essentially a cloth ball on the end of a meter long chain. At the opposite end of the chain is a small loop into which one slips a digit or two. Having accomplished this, the poi'er dips the cloth balls into kerosene, lights them on fire, then proceeds to spin them over, around and behind their bodies, their pace increasing as the rhythm accelerates.



Uhhh...dude....your light saber is on fire!








The Thai people on the island are typically proficient at this art form. As seen in the picture above, they can also practice their craft with sticks coated at either end with kerosene. Much of poi spinning involves the throwing of the fiery chains and sticks into the air and catching them in various interesting and acrobatic ways. Done correctly, a firespinner can create a halo of jagged flames over their head, can make the fire dance in opposite rhythmes on either side of their body and can fling the winged light high up into a night sky, briefly obscuring the stars durings its parabolic flight back to the still gyrating hands of the firespinner.

This is when it is done properly.

Unfortunately, there are a number of people who, singed dreadlocks attesting to the contrary, seem to believe that they possess the innate grace, timing and rhythm required to participate in this unique activity without hurting themeselves. Combine this assumption with massive quantities of alcohol and drugs, and throw in loose, light, baggy clothing and unwashed, ass-length hair, and you have yourself a recipe for comedy! Even more unfortunately, the flights of the fire that I described as "parabolic" contain a necessary truth: a parabola is an arc, not a straight line. In order to catch a flung object that is moving along an arced path and not a straight up/down one requires a person to move to catch it. Many of the amateur spinners seemed to neglect this aspect of physics. Thus, it was not uncommon to see that brilliant tongue of fire lifting into the sky, only to be followed moments later by the high pitched screaming of a newly minted member of the "guess what happened to me at the FMP?!!?" club. Taking membership now!


Claire is so strong she can actually bend me in half with the merest touch...it took three weeks at a chiropractor to fix this...thanks a lot Claire!



Still, it was enthralling to watch the fire dance to the command of a frenetic man, wildly and inexplicably making it move to his own rhythm while keeping time with the beats pumped out by the steroidic speakers lining the beach.

I have also made mention of the exceptional organization that this party manifests. There were two events, in addition to the streets lined with bucket sellers, that made this preparation apparent. The first was the abundant, and amazing food that was being distributed on the beach. Over the past 6 or so months, I have eaten things ranging from very tasty to very terrifying. Much of what I have eaten has come from people selling me things from small carts at which they cook the food while I wait. The FMP was no exception, except that it was so exceptional. The had skewers with a chicken. No, I don't mean a skewer of chicken, I mean a skewer with a f&$#ing chicken on it. You could literally buy an entire chicken roasted over a fire in a large grill and brushed with some kind of spices for about a buck. I have since learned that eating most of a chicken that is covered in a kind of bar-b-que sauce, and then placing your hands on the sand, and then on your face, is a supremely stupid idea, but I didn't care, this was some good freakin' chicken! There were also the requisite pad thai stalls, spring rolls, pastries, rolls, curries and all other manner of delicious eatables to keep even the most robust of partiers fueled til the break of noon. All of this wondrous food was laid out in a kind of state fair-esque midway that seemd to have been reserved specifically for it. Where the stalls stood, there was no bar. It was necessary to cross through this area to get from one half of the beach to the other, and you could not help but salivate at the smells emanating from the mini-kitchens as you passed. That's good organization. Oh and no bargaining. Everything had a price and if you didn't like it, you weren't getting any food.

The other way that I learned of the excellent organization of the party involved, somewhat embarassingly, yours truly and an inopportune place/moment to catch some z's. As the night wore on (and wear on me it did) I found myself increasingly...well....exhausted. Not only had I been diving that day (which kind of screws with you anyway), not only had I been dancing like a lunatic for the past eight and a half hours, not only had I eaten and drank enough to make Dionysus jeaous, but I had been doing all this while muddling through sand and people, trudging my way up and down increasingly crowded beaches that seemed less and less yielding every pass I made. Come an hour before sunrise, I gave up.

I had planned to party til noon, I really had. I wanted to find the "secret" party that I had found out about on the flier that had been handed to me by no less than 10 people. I wanted to prove how hardcore a backpacker I was by partying the lastest at the greatest party on earth. I wanted to do those things...and so in order to have the energy to keep going, I laid down on th beach for a moment to catch a minute of rest...

...Two hours later, I was rudely awakened by two very impatient looking Thai men who had grabbed my shirt and were shaking me. Hard. For a second I thought that I was being robbed. Then I started laughing because the only thing that I had brought with me from Ko Tao (where I was diving and upon which I had left all of my belongings) was 10 dollars in cash and a pen, all of which were gone. I stopped laughing long enough to check that my shoes were still on my feet, after all, shoes are worth something. Finding my shoes safely glued to my feet by beer, and the other detritus that had accumulated over the night, I turned my attention to my would be assailants. Then I noticed something interesting about them.

They were wearing uniforms.

They were taking my pulse.

They were shining a light into my eyes.

"Hey" I said..."stop that."

They spit something at each other quickly in Thai and off they went down the beach. Propping myself up on my elbows, I could see at one end of the beach a depressing and bizarre tableau. maybe 100 people, moving slowly to a raging house beat. They looked like the walking dead, but I knew what they really were: the walking faithful. They believed in the myth of the hardest core partier, the one that is talked about in legend and whispered about on dark nights. The backpacker who partied for 24 hours straight then went bungee jumping then hiked alone in the jungle for a month then had a funny incident with local culture. I know that story, and I know that it is a lie. But it is a lie perpetuated by me and my kind, people who refuse to believe that there is a limit to the amount of fun that can be had, people who can feel competitive about something like hours on a bus, people who think that having travelers diarrhea is a mark of honor.

Crazy people, really.



Ahhh!! The flash of a camera! Pose!





So the medics went on down the beach, a beach looking like a combination of an invasion from a country of people who have been collecting all of the worlds trash, and a bunch of beached seals. Indeed, by my count there were at least 20 other people within 50 yards of me stretched out on the sand in various manners of repose, only a few of which looked comfortable or natural.

So ended my experience with the FMP. I had fun, I danced a lot, I ate a chicken and I developed a minor case of actue epilepsy from the lights and crowd. As I sat on a low wall in town, waiting for a taxi to take me back to the boat that would take me back to Ko Tao so that I could, that very day, take my Advanced Open Water Scuba Test, I couldn't help but smile at the fact that I had done it. I had been to the legendary, the revolutionary, the ineffable and remarkably well orchestrated Thai Full Moon Party and I was so excited by the thought that I promptly fell asleep, sitting up, with my arm fully outstretched in the air in front of me. I know this because a fellow party-goer snapped a picture of me then woke me up to show me how funny I looked.

I did indeed...look quite funny.



Not at all; drunk, exhausted, hungry, happy and confused




Next: The briefest of returns to Bangkok for one more goodbye and WELCOME TO JAPAN...where nothing makes any sense whatsoever, plus the emergence of Rich-San into our narrative.