Full moon party day! We began with breakfast at a restaurant overlooking beautiful Haad Salad beach. Although we've seen plenty of good beaches, it's the first time since Fiji that we've seen a beach this perfect - palm trees, shallow, crystal clear water, soft white sand…paradise! We enjoyed our breakfast and headed straight onto the sand, which is where we stayed for most of the day! Chris and I had a stroll along to the end of the beach, which took all of ten minutes, and we went for lunch in another beachside restaurant called the Salad Hut (we had chicken) and that was about it! We were in and out of the sea all day and spent a long time lying in the sun, which explained the bad sunburn that Chris suffered - painful!

Before the mayhem of the Full Moon, we headed back to the hotel for a rest and we all fitted in a couple of hours sleep! At 9pm, we headed to our hotel restaurant where, once again, we were the only people eating! The food was good though; I had a fantastic pad Thai with just the right level of spice! Then we were off to the FMP…just as we left our hotel the heavens opened so we quickly got to the cash machine then managed to find a taxi straight away to take us there. Every car on the island seems to have been advertising a taxi service to the party for the last couple of days and it must have been a good little earner for them at 200 baht (£4) per person!

On the way, the taxi also picked up a girl from New York and we spent the rest of the journey chatting to her about our experiences in Thailand so far and about how much we loved NYC! Once we arrived in Haad Rin, things seemed quite quiet at first and we headed down the street towards the beach, calling in for our first beer of the night at a bar along the way.

When we made it to the beach (after collecting our souvenir wristbands!) we found that we were at the quieter end - we quite liked it but we were on the hunt for Chris' friend Billie who was going to meet us there, so we slowly made our way down the beach through the huge crowds. There were so many people on the beach (along with fire jugglers, massive sound systems, dance platforms and the rest) that it was a struggle to get anywhere in a hurry! Along the way to meet Billie, we bought our first 'buckets', which are sold all the way along the beach and are basically a bucket that you used to build sandcastles with filled with either vodka or whisky, Red Bull and another mixer of your choice. We also bumped into a Swedish girl who had some pink body paint and we all left with various parts of us painted (I had 'Sweden' down one arm, Laura got a love heart and Chris got some war stripes on his face!) Oh, and I picked up some UV, glow-in-the-dark glasses for 50 baht - see the photos for the full effect!

We eventually found Billie and spent the rest of the night with them having a laugh on the beach. In the early hours we got another drenching from some crazy rain which all added to the experience - a surreal kind of night! I think a few too many buckets may have been involved and it's all a bit of a blur now, but the photos tell their own story! Definitely worth experiencing once (and probably once only!) and we had a really good night! I'm sure the same won't be said about tomorrow morning…