Fool moon fevah!

By Seymour Cumming

It's that bloody time of the year again. That time when my peaceful little existence here gets interrupted by tourists. Crickey! Plane loads of them, undeterred by terrorists, SARS or STDs, disembarking from the airport and train station in a feeding frenzy of touts and tuk tuk drivers.

It's that time of year when travelling in the Kingdom is a nightmare, trains and buses need be booked days in advance, all the guesthouses double their rates and the bar girls get choosy. Man, these bloody backpackers.

Anyways, wanting to know what all the fuss was about I decided well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, so I took off for this Koh Phangan place that all them backpackers been talking about for years. Thought I might retire to the islands, get mesself some of that full moon fevah.

First stop was Kao San road. Man what a freakshow. Full of friggin foreigner farangs on a friggin feeding frenzy of this tie dye and hippie clothing, with them dreadlocks and scruffy bags. Man, you'll never pick up a bar girl like that you fool. Anyways, after I'd hung out with the hippies for a few days I figured I was in on how to get cool with all this full moon stuff.

For starters, this is how you get from Kao San road to Koh Phangan: buy ticket from sweet smiling travel agent. Discover ticket is for Phang Nga bay. Re-issue ticket. Taxi pickup at 10:30pm, drives two blocks and dumps you among thousands of other backpackers heading the same way. Sit around for two hours. Mai pen rai. Bloody heck!

Mass pandemonium and disorganisation with issuing of colour-coded stickers to designate your final destination. All yellow stickers (destination Koh Phangan), please board yellow bus. "Solly, mistake, red stickers board yellow bus, blue stickers board red bus, yellow stickers - no bus yet, mai pen rai". Green bus arrives, yellow stickers board green bus please. Green stickers, "solly, you go tomollow." Mai pen rai. Crikey!

Eventually leave Kao San road at midnight, arrive Surat Thani 4pm the next day. Repeat of above procedure with addition of a thousand more smelly, skint backpackers, and colour codes silver, gold and purple thrown in for good measure. Head for Don Sa Pier with death wish driving.

Sit around at Don Sa Pier for another two hours. Mai pen rai. More backpackers roll up. More pandemonium. More stickers, this time with numbers not colours. Three-hour ferry trip with more chundering than a rollercoaster simulator in a beer hall. Scheduled time of arrival 6:30pm, final time of arrival 8:30pm - mai pen bloody rai!

But that was nothing compared to the dog fight that broke out on the quayside over the few remaining bungalows available on the complete opposite side of the island. Man you should've seen it, the Aussies and the Poms were gitting in fights (Not over the rugby, but over who gets the beer!), part of the quayside collapsed, even the navy and the goddamn marines arrived. Strewth, can't take these Aussie backpackers anywhere these days.

And this was still four days before the party. Heck! 'Whatta we do now' I thought, already worried about the scarcity of bar girls. But then the friggin hippie from the group I'm travelling with says, "like, hey dude we'll, like, sleep in our hammocks on the beach and smoke some of the weed they're growing up in them thar hills." There I was imaging it was gonna be like that beach movie. Silly me.

Well, to be honest, I couldn't remember much of the next four days because I kept having them happy cake things for breakfast, and the hippies are twirling fire and doing that yoga shite and meditating on the beaches and eating all that vegetarian crapola. Man, and this is supposed to a holiday. Where are the jet-skis and wimmin and casinos and noisy tuk tuks and karaoke bars. Jeez man, this is Thailand, the places just ain't the same without them.

And when I finally got to the Full Moon Party, there was so many people there dancing to all this rave music stuff, and everyone getting all weird on these mushrooms and soon I'm tripping out on all this day-glo shlock and everyone starts looking like a suicide bomber.

Seriously, no jokes, one guy looked like Osama bin Laden and I'm thinking this guy's brilliant, got the US Army running all over Iraq and Afghanistan and here he is raving it up in Thailand, but then I got talking to the bloke and he says he ain't Osama, just a bearded Israeli whose been in India for six months. Phew! Maybe I've been watching too much Fox TV.

Well, safely back in Chiang Mai, I can say I have 'done' the rave thing in Thailand. Even though I'm apparently 10 years too late, I have done Koh Phangan, been there, done the girls, survived to tell the tale. Actually I kinda like being a bloody tourist.

Investigative-journalist-at-large, Seymour Cumming has previously been a used car salesman, fruit picker, 'shock jock' and newsroom war correspondent. He has written for Farmer's Weekly, Nyet!, Chessworld and Cross-stitching Magazine.

He's been to more than 50 countries, some for less than a day, and is currently working on a travel novel, but he's written the author's biog, and not progressed much beyond that. His controversial commentary on ex-pat life in Thailand appears in Chiang Mai City Life Magazine.