Werewolf Bar Mitzvah

From Koh Samui we joined the monthly migration of backpackers to the island of Koh Phangan ("fan-yan"), home of the Full Moon Party. We stayed at Hat Rin Beach, which was chock-full of young (average age = 22) British flashpackers looking for a good time. We arrived two days early to secure decent accomodation - estimates say even in the low season up to 8000 people attend the Full Moon Party.

The nights leading up to the party, and the night of the party itself, found everyone on the beach. Activities included dancing (mostly to horrible trance music), playing fire games (jumping rope with a rope on fire, "spitting" fire with a mouth full of alcohol and a torch), and drinking buckets (literally, small buckets of of extremely strong vodka/whiskey/rum cocktails). Even though we were definitely older than most of the people there, we embraced the atmosphere and indulged in a few buckets. The bucket booths are a thing to behold: a long line-up of rickety wooden booths on the beach, with Thais yelling at you to buy their bucket, as the competition is fierce and they are all exactly the same.

We stayed on Hat Rin for a few extra days after the party, to witness the beach go utterly deserted and the area turn into a ghost town. It was actually nice and relaxing.

Our final stop on our Southern Beaches Tour was Koh Tao, famous for its scuba diving. Since we both completed our Open Water and Advanced scuba certifications in Australia five years ago, we did four "fun dives". Some were better than others, and we realized how spoiled we were with most of the diving we did in Australia. Even the snorkeling we did in Malaysia was more interesting (in terms of marine life). However, it was great to get back under the water - it's an incredible feeling to be swimming 25 m underwater with a school of fish 5 m across swimming along beside you. And Thailand's diving in much better - and cheaper (at less than $30/dive including boat trip and equipment) - than any of the diving you can do in Ontario!

Now we're in Bangkok, safe in the tourist bubble of Khao San Road and Soi Rambutri. Apparently it's calmed down here a lot, but this area is so far from where the Red Shirt protestors were, we wouldn't even know if anything was up. The 8 pm curfew has been lifted but there are much less tourists around compared to when we were here in January. We're not sure if that's due to it being the low season now, all the Bangkok unrest, or both.

Tonight we take an overnight bus to Vientiane, the capital city of Laos. We're excited to be getting to a new country to explore, especially since so many people have told us how wonderful Laos is. The southern beaches of Thailand were lovely and relaxing, but were not really representative of Thai culture, so we're looking forward to getting away from the party backpacker scene (kind of) and immersing ourselves into a new culture. Plus, we feel rich going to Laos; at around 7900 kip to the Canadian dollar, we became millionaires after exchanging around $170 CAD!

Today it is 3 months exactly until we return home, and we have 3 more countries to visit: Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. We're pretty sure time is going to fly!