On the Full Moon/KO PHA NGAN

The first order of the day is first aid.  Even for me, I was feeling abnormally blase about the whole burned flesh business.  It was more the continued lack of a hangover that made me awfully uneasy.  Maybe it was cumulative, and at some inopportune time I would suddenly be struck with the skull-rending force of two months of pent-up morning-after suffering, spontaneously-combusting my liver and bursting my brain.  Or maybe it was the humidity.  Still, uneasy...

I saunter over to a Friends bar to google burn treatments, only for the town to have another power outage.  After a few drinks (to taunt the looming specter of hangovers to come), the power comes back on, and I sit down in an internet cafe to do some research.

First, I sign up for travel insurance, while I still have some sliver of self-preservation instinct left.  Also, the laws of irony dictate that by doing so, I'm guaranteed to never get injured again.  Next, I do a search along the lines of "what to do if you're an idiot who burned themselves doing something stupid in Ko Pha Ngan."  There turns out to be a great deal of information on the topic.

It seems many backpackers will get the "Ko Pha Ngan Tattoo" from rental scooter accidents, by either burning themselves on overheated tail pipes, or road rash after wiping out on one of the many dangerous and unfinished roads around the island.  What idiots!  It's those kind of irresponsible assholes who give us careful, sensitive, God-fearing backpackers a bad name.  But, somehow against all odds the same medical advice applied to my case.  And as it turns out, you're not supposed to pop the blisters ever.  So if you're ever in the same situation, make sure to keep the dirty fingernails of that gay whore off your stomach blisters.  A life tip you can take with you.

I amble over to the local clinic, situated very conveniently near the beach, and an unending source of customers.  After talking with the nurse, I find that my shiny new hundred-dollar travel insurance isn't taken up front, and I would have to send off the doctor bill to the insurance company for reimbursement.  Not wanting to spend 3 months waiting to get a check back for 15 bucks, I head to the pharmacy instead.  The way I figure it, the pharmacist'll point me to the same gear the doctor would have, plus I've already got my free internet medical advice.  After an hour of painstaking web research slash Facebooking, I'm practically qualified for surgery.

Inside the pharmacy a young, tanned British woman is consulting the pharmacist, an equally young and very perplexed Thai man.

"You know," she stammers, "When you have in-ter-course...but next day...you regret?"  He nods his head slightly, more of an idle bob, unable to parse out the hussy's demand.

"What do you call it...the pill..." she wonders aloud, before delivering more euphemistic descriptions of her predicament and the kind of help she wanted.

Just as I was about to say the words, it comes to her and she exclaims "Plan B!  I need Plan B!" and to my infinite dismay, the pharmacist understands and fetches the pills, ruining the chance of her resorting to the greatest and most humiliating sign language.

Once the walking paradox of a girl who has one night stands but doesn't know what the morning after pill is leaves, I show the pharmacist my burn and he immediately fetches the necessary supplies.  Either he has House-level powers of diagnosis and treatment, or he's seen the Ko Pha Ngan Tattoo before.  I end up buying antibiotics, bandages, Silverderm cream, and just for kicks, a pack of Xanax.  And seeing as how 10 Xanax costs 10 bucks, it looks like I'll be restricting myself to their intended use: hangovers and drug come-downs.

Speaking of good parties, tomorrow's the full moon.  Twenty thousand desperate fools dancing, thrashing, fucking, pissing, and puking in every predominate European language and custom...A drunk beach of horny werewolves only half-tamed by trance music.  It could be a bit of a spectacle.  I do a final count of limbs and digits before bed.

The day of the full moon begins with another power outage.  In addition to the burn on my stomach, my legs and ass are killing me, and I've found a bloody hole in the bottom of my right foot.  All in all, could be worse.

Before heading down to Sunrise Beach where the Full Moon Party is going to take place, I walk along Sunset Beach for the first time, and watch the sunset with a grocery bag of cold Changs.

I recommend trying it sometime.

Another power outage makes choosing a place to eat very simple, and I grab some food and drinks in a nearby restaurant that has their generator up and running.  As Jackass plays on the surrounding half dozen TVs, I'm chatted up by a German backpacker named Christian.  It would seem he was in Vang Vieng just a week and a half ago, possibly the same time as me.  While he was there, some guy died on the river.  Not wanting to be outdone in brushes with death, I share the story of my sunburn and the more recent actual-fire burn, and my ingenious DIY treatment thereof.

"Wait, jew are dreenkeeng on antibiotics?" he asks.

"Well, maybe, kinda..." comes my sheepish reply.  I hadn't really thought about it.  I come to the conclusion that if I can safely drink and take Xanax (and by safely, I mean hasn't yet made me die), antibiotics should be a cinch.  After all, they're pretty much just vitamins, right?  Like, strong vitamins.  I should be fine.

After a really great discussion about those yellow infected bumps you get on your legs after a killer burn, Christian leaves to search for some missing friends.

"Maybe jew und me will find each other later," he says.  I wonder if I'll be completely alone for the Party tonight.  Even the guy whose friends clearly stood him up doesn't want to stick it out with me.  No time for a pity-party, though.  Only time now for a party-party.

I head back to my bungalow to make final preparations for the night.  As I'm walking through town, I notice one of the cops on security duty playing with something in his hands, and grinning like a Punch doll.

Even with a picture this blurry, you know he's up to no good.  That's not a smile you should trust.

Now, I have three major fears in life.  One: compound fractures, because man that would suck.  Two: candiru, because oh man that would suck even more.  Three: the foul abomination this officer was holding in his hands at this very moment.  Something I always told myself was an irrational fear, because much like candiru, terrifying though they may be, my chances of ever encountering them were pretty low.  Well, here's irrational:

That's right.  Fear number three is giant centipedes, and here's a guy in the middle of Wonderful Paradise Island who sees fit to play with one of the nightmare factories.  After I stop to take a picture, to document the atrocity that I once thought so irrational, the officer gestures to me.  He wants me to hold it.

Hell, what's the Full Moon Party for if not a bit of immersion therapy.

Oh God I was so right it's so awful

After successfully not dying of the heebiest of jeebies, or from the centipede itself (although the cop did look visibly concerned when the monster started crawling towards my neck, at which point he snatched it away), I shiver uncontrollably all the way back to Venus and make final preparations for the night.  After I've pissed one last time, I ditch my debit card and flip flops to be safe.  I take about a hundred bucks in cash, divided into different pockets around my body to stymy pickpocketers.  And most importantly, I conquered one of my biggest fears in life.  There's nothing like a bit of emotional catharsis to get you in the mood to shake your fucking ass.  Let's do this.

I stop for one last drink in the Venus lounge, to see if anyone I've previously met is around.  There isn't, so I sup my gin and tonic and watch the end of Bruno with some UK girls.  We lightly chat, and as I pay for my drink one of them asks why I'm not buying a bucket.  I'll get one at the beach, I reply, which prompts the Venus employee to warn me about a scam some bucket stalls have where they half-fill their whiskey bottles with water.  It would explain some of the super-faded bottles I've been seeing at some of the stalls.  He advises me to listen for the "click" when they crack open the bottle.  I'm reminded of one of the banners I keep seeing around town, that makes much more sense now:

Another girl pipes in about a specific drink stall that will hold the bottle up to your ear every time so you can listen for the crack.  I'm genuinely enthused about this advice, and the first girl asks if I'd like to join them.  They're meeting eleven other girls, and I would be the only guy.  Well, that was a gimme.

I follow the gals to their meeting point in one of the Friends bars, where the group inside is discussing the gruesome medical photos the government puts on cigarette packs.

Being forced to stare at foot cancer or whatever is still worth the crazy-low prices of overseas cigs.

I make the world's most transparent attempt at learning and remembering names, and am privy to the conclusion that the most choice cigarette pack to have is one where a man's smoke is being blown into the face of a baby in his arms (probably his baby, but who's to say).  Because "while it is 'orrible 'n that, at least there's nofink real nasty."

Maybe the baby's a real dick.  The point is, we don't have all the facts here people.

The ladies tell me they're leaving at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning, but should be fine because they're all completely addicted to M-150, a potent Thai energy drink.  The clock hits 11.  The streets begin to fill.  We head to the beach.

My wolfesspack.

The noise starts from far off, a thunderous hum of a dozen different and insistent sound systems battling each other for supremacy.  I recognize a few of the playlists as the same from earlier nights, but they're now joined by music from new parties along the beach, offering bass-ed up techno in numerous and slight genre variations I am nowhere near qualified enough to identify.

I'm immediately reminded of tubing in Vang Vieng.  Like the bars there, there was such variety that you just wandered to whichever party along the sandbar was playing your taste in dance music and had the best bucket drink gimmicks.

Then we hit the crowd.  You can't even see sand, for all the thousands of day-glo painted Europeans dancing together in a half-mile long, claustrophobia-inducing flesh pit.

In other words, the party was hella bumpin'.

I buy a Sang Som and Coke bucket from the girls' favorite place, and we make our way through the shirtless, screaming amoeba that has covered the peninsula.  I dance occasionally, but mostly talk to the de facto mother hen of the group about sunburns and blisters, the usual.

The party keeps building.

It becomes hard to breathe, let alone think, amidst the Great White Throng.  At least, that's the excuse I'm going to go with in a second.  It turns out one of the side effects of drinking a giant bucket of alcohol is a pretty constant need to piss.  One of the girls and I split off from the group to try our luck at finding a bathroom.  What I hadn't counted on, foolishly, was that such massive piss-pot demand would drive all the business owners around here to either close their bathroom doors to the public, or cause them to start charging exorbitant amounts of money.

Now, I've never been a fan of paying money to use a restroom.  Even if I did cough up the cash, the lines were a staggering exercise in bladder torture.  And I wasn't about to pee in the ocean, like some others, like ANIMALS.

Anyways I'm not really sure how it happened, but we ended up sneaking into some store's generator room and peeing in the dark.  On their generator, I'm fairly sure.  And then the store worker walked in.

I freeze, no idea what plan of action to take.  Banking just a little on the worker only being able to see by movement, like a T-Rex.  It's hard to say what emotions played out across his face.  Anger, sure, but more...disappointment.  I let him down.  In a way, it felt like I had let America down.  The British girl had no such qualms.  With the cool arrogance that can only come to those born in a bullshit monarchy, she blows right by the dumbfounded Thai man and mixes back into the street, somehow managing to look bored the whole while.

His gaze returns to me, unfathoming.  Well, maybe a little fathoming.  He knows why his generator stinks of piss.  But there's nothing to be done now.  I shrug.  "Sorry!" I state stupidly, eyes wide, shoulders around my ears.  I follow the girl out.  I didn't even get to shake it off.

I continue down towards the end of the beach, towards Mellow Mountain, alone or with the group I don't remember.  From here I get a better view of the lights of the Party, even if my camera doesn't. This is really something, I think to myself.  Then I black out.

I wake up in bed, and it's almost noon.  Maybe it's because I was drinking on antibiotics.  Maybe it's because I was drinking on Xanax.  Maybe it's because I was drinking on antibiotics AND Xanax.  I don't know.  I'm not a doctor.

This man is not a doctor.

I take inventory.  There are no signs of puke or sex, the first items on my blackout checklist.  Next, nothing seems to be stolen, broken, or otherwise violated.  So far, looking good.  Curiously, I find an empty cigarette pack in one of my pockets, and I don't smoke.

And it's not even the sweet baby-smoke pack, either.

I probably should've listened to Christian, and taken it easier.  The Full Moon Party is a pretty big thing to just lose half my memory of.  I imagine myself partying bravely and honorably into the dust, like the orchestra on the Titanic, or Slurms MacKenzie.  But I also know that is not ever, ever the story behind a blackout.  Maybe it's better this way.  Maybe shit got dark.  Sometimes it's better not knowing.

I have a slight hangover, despite drinking enough to have retroactively given myself FAS.  The relief of knowing I can still get hangovers, and remain a mortal, corporeal being, is small comfort.  My pain is more spiritual than physical, likely due to complete seratonin crash.  I feel like Captain Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, and wish my room had a slow-turning ceiling fan I could stare into.  All I want to do is read Lovecraft and watch Chris Cunningham videos and be dark.  And really, the Full Moon Party is dumb if you think about it.  The same party they do every night, just with 100 times as many people and anyways it's all commercial and lame ever since the 90s when the cool people did it.  And I really, really wish I had been conscious for it.  I take a couple Xanax, a shit, and walk to the beach.

Most people must have had plans similar to the girls and left in the morning.  The beach is practically deserted compared to the last week.

While I slept, there was a community clean-up event that picked up the trash from the night before, and to my incredible surprise left the beach looking pretty good considering the bacchanalian scale of last night.  A few deserted dance stages still stand, a sobering monument to bittersweet morning-afters.

Much of the town shuts down following the Full Moon.  Food vendors keep earlier hours, there are fewer parties on the beach, and some dance clubs I was planning to check out close down until the next Party.  I spend the next few days drinking, eating, and collecting wifi passwords around town.  I want to move on to Ko Tao, an island north of Ko Pha Ngan renowned for its diving, but I'm still waiting on my stomach burn to heal.  Here, the tourist population seems to have dwindled to just the injured like me, and, for some reason, Israelis.  Everywhere, stores and restaurants start to incorporate Hebrew into their hand-written signs, and advertise Israeli Breakfast, rather than the usual American or British.  Many restaurants put up notices that they have run out of Matzah.

These days of nothing to do last longer.  A kind of Hedonistic Relativity occurs, and time expands.  I become concerned with trying a new restaurant and bar for every meal and drink.

And that's how I ended up eating a bacon sandwich.  Australians,  you're growing on me.

Now that I have the time and resources to find such things out, I realize I vastly overpaid for both my ticket to Ko Pha Ngan, and my scuba lessons.  But that's how it goes.  On nights, I continue to go out to the beach.  New games spring up, where you try to throw a basketball hoop from a distance for a chance at winning a free bucket drinks.

One night I run into the hooker who I told I had no money.  She recognizes me and slaps me on the shoulder, smiling drolly.  It was a relief to know she had a sense of humor about it, as opposed to stabbing me to death.  I also see the boy/girl/brother/sister/whatever hooker team, but they either don't recognize or ignore me.  Which I am totally cool with.

Finally, I have to do something to get off my ass, if just to keep from waking up any more with half-drunk buckets on the floor attracting ants and free drink counters written in haphazard marker on my arm.

I buy a ticket for another Muay Thai event, this time at a different arena.  What’s that, you ask?   You want an exhaustive list of comparisons of these matches to the 80s Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle Kickboxer?  

I mean, I guess I could do that.  Since you asked.

For one, the white guy is always heavily favored, even if you can't do split-kicks!  They also really don't appreciate it when you chant "Nak Soo Khao!" in a fevered bloodlust.  Medical treatment tended to happen inside the ring, instead of not happening at all and the loser being dumped outside in an alley, and the fighters did not once beat and rape women before a fight (Geez, what a movie).  Very few split-punches were thrown, and even fewer split-kicks performed.  At one point a cocaine-addled black sidekick almost stormed the place with a machine gun, but then it turned out I don't have mind powers and it didn't happen.

Just boring ol' concussions.

After the fights, I end up at a bar called Moonstone.  The whole place has a Playboy bunny theme, Jackass 3D is playing on the TV but impossible to hear over the dance music, and when I order a drink, it comes in a baby bottle.

I was also completely alone in the bar, as I sucked on the horridly sweet cocktail through its plastic nipple.  Everything seemed normal and alien and awful all at the same time.  I couldn't tell what I was doing here anymore.  I didn't even know if I was enjoying myself.  All I could feel was my mind becoming more and more unhinged.

Also, the place had one of the most stocked bathrooms I have ever seen.  A lint roller and mouthwash?!

Outside, there's a 3-legged dog lying in the street, trying to sleep.  I don't know why, but I watch it for awhile before going back to my room.

The next day, I'm eating at an Italian place called Fellini (that is decorated entirely in Fellini film posters and movie stills) when Christian, the German antibiotic-police, walks in.  As it turns out, he actually did end up finding his friends, and he tells me I was right to be optimistic.  We have a nice chat, until he leaves to rejoin his friends.  And he's right (about me being right).  I should be optimistic.  More productive.  Meet people!  I'm a traveler (testify!), and it's time to get back into the spirit of things.  So long as my sanity doesn't finally crumble into shards of drink bucket plastic and ridiculous platitudes about "freedom", everything'll be peaches and cream.  Delicious peaches and cream.