Every month thousands of travellers from around the world descend upon the small island of Koh Phangan in the Gulf of Thailand for the Full Moon Party on the beach at Haad Rin. It is like a ritual of Babylon. The pimply youth cover their faces in luminous grease paint wear their coolest beach shorts or bikinis and get drunk on the beach. They drink the famous Koh Phangan drink called the ‘bucket’ in excess, do a bit of dancing and smooch around looking for amorous daliance
It has just become such a cliche and like all cliche things to do, the experience has lost much of its original meaning.
The first Full Moon Party took place at Paradise Bungalows in the 1980s. It was a spontaneous scheme to celebrate the moon at its peak, a return to nature worship, a bond with the insanity of countless generations who have been fascinated by the pale glow of moon beams. It is a time for carnival, a time for change, a time for female cycles.
Undoubtably at that first party they danced all night, got stoned on marijuana and Thai whisky, made new friends, splashed in the lapping waves and went to bed after watching the sunrise over the sea. It must have been a great party because it created many imitators.
The gatherings got larger and grew in noteriety. What began as one get-together soon became many parties all competing for tourists, all trying to drown out each other’s music, all offering pretty much the same thing. As the customers started descending on Had Rin in growing numbers so those hoping to make a fast baht also began flocking to the beach in ever growing numbers.
First new bungalows were built taking up every vacant square foot of space along the fringe of the beach. Then the bars all with the same prices and menus squeezed themselves amid the bungalows and along the main thoroughfares. Then the drug dealers came peddling poorly made equivalents of the party drugs available in Europe and the States. Weak pills and powders that by-passed the elation and just made you grind your teeth like a fanatic. And with the opportunistic dealers came the equally opportunistic ladies of the night.
And there it started. The Full Moon Party became an official thing. An event and a ‘must do’ for all those travellers taking a sabatical before college. It was fashionable to do the Full Moon Party just as you had to lease a van in Australia and drive around the coastal roads and just as you must plod the Inca trail and see Machu Picchu. And when something becomes a must do it loses its original intent. The Full Moon Party stopped being a get-together of cool people hanging out and having fun with the locals and turned into an event of 1000s of wannabee cool youth posing around and getting cheated by non-local Thais.
Thais from all over Thailand are now involved in the lucrative scam called the Full Moon Party. And the worst of the bunch are the coppers. Uniformed and undercover they patrol all night not to stop the robbery or the fights, not to insure the safety of farangs on the beach, not to stop the solicitation, but to bust those stupid enough to try and smoke weed on the beach. That is their rasion d’etre. Once they have a victim they then relish scaring the shit out of him or her until any demand for currency will be met with a prompt compliance. It is huge business this crusade against narcotics; so much so that in the 1990s English coppers used to take working holidays to paradise to join in the fun of busting ganja lovers. There is nothing good in that.
And that still is not enough. The Thais still want to squeeze more cash out of the party. I suspect the folk story about the goose laying golden eggs never entered the annals of their folk wisdom. Now they want to charge attendees an entrance fee to come into the world famous ‘Full Moon Party’. Who will get to keep this entrance fee? Will some of it go towards tidying up the beach after the event? Or perhaps some of the Baht might be used to buy much needed supplies for the local school or the overloaded hospital? I think not.
The saddest aspect of all this for me is the fact that Haad Rin was once a really beautiful beach blessed with both sunrise and sunset beaches. It used to be a place of funky little bamboo bungalows and friendly laid back locals – a bona fide island paradise.
That paradise has disappeared forever. The original colurful folk that used to rejoice under the stars have long since moved on or got jobs. Just like with Goa, the hippies who believe in love and sharing have long since realized what a mockery and commercial fiasco their monthly bash has become and have sought out fresher pastures for their revelries.
If you want a cool beach without prostitutes and law enforcement, without peddlars and swaggering gangsters you ought to go to more far-flung regions of Koh Phangan. Spots like Bottle Beach and Thong Nai Pan still have untouched white sand beaches, low-priced bungalows and mellow vibes. These are the places where you can be left alone to stare at the stars, have a chuckle with the locals, see butterflies playing in the shallows, catch fish and recline in a hammock and not be disturbed by over-loud P.A. systems and chucking up youth.
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