I;ve never actually seen the movie Run Lola Run, but I have seen the Simpsons parody of it and the movie Go. Last night was the famous Full Moon Party on the Island of Koh Pha Ngan, which has about 7,000 (10,000 to 15,000 in peak season) people crammed onto this beach for a night of partying. There were about 17 of us who started the night having dinner at around 10 pm, and we weren't all together again until 6 pm the next night, having dinner back at our bungalow. Now, my opening comment refers to the fact that I would have loved to see the night starting from dinner at the restaurant and then seen the night from 3 or 4 peoples different perspective, and then had it finish with us having dinner the next night.

My night started, like everybody elses, getting off the boat at the quiet side of the island. At dinner, we ended up meeting a couple people from SFU at the restaurant we were at, which was kinda cool. For those of you who know Keira, a friend I met in first year rez, she ended up meeting Erik and I the day of the Full Moon and is probably gonna hang out with us for a couple of days. She's doing kinda the opposite trip, starting in Indonesia, and working her way North through Thailand. It was nice to see her, and our kind of ad hoc plan to meet up at full moon worked quite well.

After dinner, we headed over to the full moon beach, and it was pretty packed. There are about 7 or 8 large clubs that line the beach that each play a different type of music. On top of that, there were people spilled out all over the beach in front of these clubs. I unfortunately do not have any digital pictures of this as I decided I didn't really want to take my camera in case it went missing. I pretty much just spent the night dancing at a couple of the clubs along the beach. I did make a quick stop in to this restaurant (not on the beach) that played Simpsons pretty much all day (ahh Simpsons, how I miss you). Around 3:30 I managed to get seperated from the group. Now, finding people on a beach of 7000 people is not an easy task. I ended up running into Keira at around 5. We managed to find a couple other people and catch a ferry home at around 6 am. Unfortunately, breakfast was not yet served, so I went back to my bungalow, went to sleep till about 11:30, and woke up absolutely fine. No headache, nothing, and went down and had breakfast.

Jerome's Night

This is were I would love to have seen some other people's nights. Jerome is a guy from Wales that I ended up meeting my last day in Koh Tao, and he came over with us to Koh Pha Ngan. The last time I saw Jerome was about midnight, and he didn't get home until about 3 in the afternoon the next day.

Apparently, around 5 pm he found a girl who was in bare feet and had cut the bottom of her foot on some glass. She couldn't really find any of her friends, so Jerome, being the nice guy that he is, took her by speed boat to a nearby island to take her to hospital. When I saw him the next day he had cuts and bites all over his back. Apparently he fell asleep in some bushes after making sure the girl was ok, and had been attacked by some ants. This really isn't a huge surprise, as this is coming from a guy who climbed up one of the nearby mountains to get a view of the island, except there weren't any discernable paths to the top, and he came back with a nice set of scrapes from the bushes he climbed through.

Ramon's Night

Now Ramon (he's in one of my scuba photos) is a Dutch guy who we met scuba diving. I saw Ramon coming in on a boat from my breakfast table around noon. When he came up to the table, I asked him where he was and he replied in his Dutch accent, "When I woke up I was on the opposite end of the island and had a dog licking my face". Ramon doesn't really drink that often, but he figured that since it was full moon and he was going back to Holland in 4 days why not. The last time I saw him was around 12:30, bucket in hand. He got seperated from the everyone else around 2 am, and had gotten a little sick. This Dutch couple found him and were nice enough to take him back to their place which has reachable by car. The only problem with this is that it was the exact opposite end of the island. So when he woke up, he didn't really know where he was, or how to get home. It took him about 2 hour, and $20 (which is a fair bit in Thailand) to get back home. But when he got there, he had a big smile on his face, and a good story to tell!!

That's about all for now. Everybody managed to make it home safely and in one piece. It was kinda sad to have to leave this morning. When you're travelling you meet people, hang out with them for a while, but inevitably have to part ways. I had to say goodbye to the 3 girls I had been travelling with the past 2 weeks. Not sure if I will get a chance to run into them again, maybe if I go to Scotland, or they come to Canada. Oh well, that part of travelling, on to meeting new people. I'm currently in Surat Thani right now, and am gonna do visa run (Thai visa last for 30 days, but to renew them, you just have to leave the country) early tomorrow morning. After that, I am heading down to Krabi on the west coast of Thailand to meet up with Erik, Keira, and 4 British guys that we met diving and came with us to full moon...

I'll update when I get a chance...

Cheers,
Drew