Thailand – Koh Pangnan
FULL MOON PARTY
All the stories are true.
Well, at least that’s what I’m told. Haha just kidding although the days
surrounding the full moon party are a bit of a blur I’m fully aware that I had
an excellent time. Epic Pool parties
that would make project x jealous; to tens of thousands of people on the beach
dancing in the glow of the moon, people here know how to do it right. Unfortunately I was told to not bring any
valuable except for money to any of the parties on Haad Rin(the main beach) and so I don’t have
any pictures to show. Although this doesn’t
explain the lack of pictures back at our bungalow when everyone was getting
ready for the full moon party with neon body painting. Cerveza anyone?
Koh Pangnan has been the island of fun and new friends for
certain. Renae and I found a great
little bungalow a short distance from the beach for rather cheap when compared
to our neighbors. We rented a motorbike
and made good use of it exploring the island in all directions, luckily neither
of received koh pangnan tattoos (road rash) which put us in the minority group
of the island. The day after the full
moon party you couldn’t walk anywhere without seeing people strutting their
awesome gauze accessories around their ankles, knees, and arms. Road rash to the max. The roads here are quite sketchy and the sand
on them does make them any more appealing.
The beach on Koh Pangnan where we’re staying is called Haad
Yao. It is a nice stretch of sand with bungalows and hotels all along the sand.
Each place has it’s own little restaurant right on the beach and you can find
people you know everywhere you go. Basically Renae and I eat breakfast on the
beach. Eat lunch on the beach. And munch dinner on the beach. All time in between is spent snacking and drinking
on this beach. It’s a demanding life. I
know.
Apparently Renae is quite popular in south east asia, she tends to find
people she knows from this place or that all over. We've run into John
in two countries and several different locations, it's not even a
coincidence or a surprise when we run into him any more. haha good times and good people
OH right, I spent my birthday here as well. Pretty good one in my opinion, brought it in by spending time with new friends enjoying the night ocean and watched the sun come up. John (renae's friend from highschool) was also hanging out with us. Went a nice little morning run (about 2 minutes in this place is all it takes to start sweating with the humidity and the gnarly hills) to work off the night prior before heading out to a pirate bar on the beach about a 5 minute taxi ride away. Actually it was about 4km away now that I think about it because Renae and I both ended up walking back. Good times. Bringing in 24 years of age on Koh Pangnan was quite awesome.
Met Steffni
and Franzine from Germany, who joined Sean (from Canada) and myself on a hike to
bottle beach. I think renae was taking it easy that day. But on this particular
day laying on the beach, swimming and reading was not doing it for me so I
told Sean we should get on the bikes and set out to go find bottle beach. The german girls had been the original ones
to tell us about the secluded beach that few people went to because of the 1.5
hours hike to it. After persuading the girls that they could lay on the beach
any other day, we all set out on a pair of bikes racing towards the north side of
the island. Navigating directions from
the locals we ended up in a nice little vista point where we parked the bikes
next to numerous others and set out in search of this lonely beach. Well long story short we hiked for about 30-40
minutes before coming face to face with solid rock face that was impassible
without the use of ropes. We were just
following a creek bed running up the mountain that we thought was the trail,
turns out it definitely was not. After
careful consideration and exploring we decided to head back; turning around a
few other hikers we met along the way.
Not letting that stop us, we got back to the bikes and then walked
around searching for any other trail heads and found another which had a bunch
of water bottles hanging on the branches of the trees…
Bottle beach right?
Haha yep. So we set off again, a little more pressed for
time at this point as it was later in the day.
Oh yea, btw note that this hiking was exactly strenuous, but for some
reason I’ve never sweat so much in my life, I’m not sure if it was the lack of
breeze or the humidity, but I def went through 3 liters of water within the 2.5
hours of hiking. Once we crested the
mountain we headed down the other side with an encouraging breeze at our faces
all the while following the hundreds of trail markers that hung on tree
branches. Usually I’m not stoked on finding trash on trails but these seemed to
make sense and had purposely been placed on the trail for markers. Well we finally made it. It was great, but a little anticlimactic as
it was not as lonely of a beach as we had hoped. There are in fact no roads to it, but water
taxis were fully employed here to support the 20 or bungalows and couple
restaurants. It was still a much nicer
and more mellow beach seen, but a little disappointing to find that it was not
very secluded. We opted for a nice
boat/taxi ride back to the port where we got a ride with some guys from our
beach back to where out bikes were parked.
All in all a great day hiking followed up by the full moon party.
Was a little tough leaving this place. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not too stressed though, I'm sure thailand will be on my itinerary once again.
Oh yea, I liked making all kinds of sand castles on the
beach as well.
