On the evening of the 8th (Full Moon Night!) we dined with a few of the people we'd met in Langkawi before heading back to the hostel to cover ourselves in fluorescent paint and put on the brightest clothing we could find. When we finally managed to tear ourselves away from fingerpainting each other we made our way down to the beach. The party was already in full swing and the sand was covered with thousands of people dancing and drinking from brightly coloured buckets. For the next few hours we drank, we danced, we watched people taking on the burning skipping rope (with varying degrees of success), we drank some more, we stripped to our underwear and swam in the sea, we slid down a random water slide, we drank again, we visited numerous sandwich stalls, until finally we ended the night in an entirely un-rock'n'roll way - drinking orange fruit shakes and watching our friend eat fried rice by plunging his head into the plate. We went to bed at 5am, then got back up at 7am to watch the (surprisingly few) hardcore people dancing just after the sun had risen. The sky was beautiful but the beach was not; there were bottles and people sleeping everywhere!

Over the next day or so we saw so many people with bandaged feet (burns from the skipping ropes? cuts from broken bottles?) and with paint still in their hair or in hard-to-reach places, which was quite funny. We spent the 9th on the beach and relaxing at the hostel before taking on our final Koh Phangan bucket.

Yesterday we caught a taxi, a boat and a bus to Surat Thani train station, then an overnight train from there to Bangkok. The 13 hour train journey was quite fun. We had little bunk beds with a green curtain that we could pull across for privacy, and canvas straps that went from floor to ceiling to stop us from falling out of bed in the night. We pulled the curtains across immediately in an attempt to mask the smell coming from the boxes of durian fruit that someone had inconsiderately placed on our luggage rack (annoying as it was, I can't say I blame the owner for storing the notoriously stinky fruit away from their own bed, I would have done the same). The mattresses were thin but felt like luxury after the ridiculously hard beds we had in Koh Phangan, and even the noise and the rattling and the shaking, loud as it was, didn't feel too bad considering we'd got used to sleeping through loud dance music over the last few days. In the morning the attendant folded down our beds, so that we had two large chairs facing each other, and brought us a breakfast of eggs, sausages and toast. We ate it whilst looking out the window at the fields, rivers and villages whizzing past.

We arrived in Bangkok around 10.30am and caught the metro to our hostel. Both exhausted!! Keep nodding off mid-sentence...