Full Moon Party by Steve

Although I had vaguely known that beach parties were part and parcel of Thailand, I hadn't known in much detail about the Full Moon Party until a few months ago, before our trip started. Now that we were in Ko Pha Nagn, the site of one of the biggest Full Moon Parties, had paid inflated accomodation costs and taxi fares, I was getting excited. Days spent on boat trips and by the beach or pool were perfect preparations for a potentially gruelling up-until-dawn beach party. Like Olympic athletes, we got into training by staying up later and later in the 3 days beforehand.

On the 16th, full moon night, we went out quite late, no point burning out early! When we got to Hat Rin, which was not far from ours in a taxi, it was absolutely packed. The taxi park was rammed with taxis, motorbikes lined every street. Some people were having a huge argument outside a taxi. Were they going home already? We walked through the centre of Hat Rin. Stalls lined the narrow streets selling the infamous buckets: a sandcastle bucket with a bottle of spirits and a can of soft drink mixer. Lethal.



As we got closer to the beach, we could now hear the music booming. But we could`t see anything yet. It was a struggle to get out from the narrow roads on to the beach because of the sheer volume of people. Finally we emerged to a chaotic scene of thousands of people with buckets jigging up and down to trance music blaring out of huge speakers. It was strange but utterly brilliant, a proper sight to behold. There must have been around 15,000 people on that beach, and I have heard that it gets up to 30,000 sometimes.



Time flew by. Dawn broke quickly. It was quite surreal to be stood in the sea holding a bucket of whiskey watching the sun rise over the beach. Eventually things caught up with us and at 830am we headed home. But, even then, there were still a huge group of more than 500 people on the beach dancing to the trance beats still blaring out.


Some valiant attempts to storm the beach end in tragedy

The next day was, predictably, a non starter...