We enjoyed a few days in Ko Phangan before the full moon party and moved on the second day to a nice guesthouse called Jaya which was above a bar and in a good location, with a terrace.
We hired a scooter and explored the island and found a lovely, remote beach called coral beach which had nice food and very clear water, if we were staying longer we would have stayed in the beach bungalows!
The full moon party was crazy with up to 6, 000 people on the beach at its peak. There was lots of bars with very loud sound systems competing for punters. There were lots of stalls selling buckets and as you walk past them they practically fall over themselves to get your attention. The names of the stalls are quite surprising, each trying to be even more shockingly rude that the last, I guess to get your attention! There was a ‘sleeping zone’ that was filled with people passing out with the friends trying to make them come too, someone had changed the sign to ‘humiliation zone’ . We had our face painted with the UV paints, I asked for a little butterfly on my cheekbone but they drew a huge one across my whole cheek and Alex got a white circle around his eye, in the style of the eels character from the Mighty Boosh. He also got a hat from one of the beach sellers and so we were getting quite a few looks and nobody messed with us!
We decided to move on the morning after the full moon party and after a good sleep we got the boat to Ko Samui, which was filled with hungover partygoers. We found somewhere to stay in Chaweng the main resort in Samui, rather like the Costa Del Sol with burger king, McDonalds and pizza hut. It was very aimed towards people on two week holidays and very expensive. The next day we got a another scooter and scooted round the whole island and found a lovely place called ‘fisherman’s village which has a very French feel to it. We decided to spend a few days here and so went back got our bags. That evening when we went out to dinner we found that this was also an area aimed at two week holiday goers and was very very expensive everywhere! We found somewhere not too expensive and Alex had a crab (his new favourite food) and I had fish and chips. The next day we decided to get a scooter and find what this area had to offer and we went to the Aquarium and Tiger Zoo. The shows were geat fun and amazing to see a man tease a tiger by dangling meat in front on him in mouth and then the tiger eating it! The tigers also jumped through fire and danced with the men. Very surreal! You could also have your photo taken with the tiger, but after seeing the fear on a lady’s face as she did it I thought id taken a ‘mental’ picture instead! We decided to spend another day on the bike and found a Tesco’s that had a cinema and a bowling alley. Unfortunately the cinema was only showing ‘G-Force’ which neither of us fancied so we went bowling where Alex beat me tremendously in both games, I’d had enough of losing by the second game! We’re off to Krabi tomorrow so we’re having a lazy day and looking into what to do when we get there. Alex’s friend Paul is in Railay at the moment as so we are going to meet up with him. Hope you’re all well and its not too cold there!