The Power of Now!
Over the last 4 years of traveling I have been to Thailand 10 times, Thailand is becoming one of my favorite places on the planet. Millions of backpackers from all over the world come here each year with their sights set on Ko Phan-ngan and its famous Full Moon Parties. Every time I’m here I avoid them like the plague, I guess I have always felt that the sight of 20 thousand drunken backpackers wasted on a beach was not a place for me. I thought I was Mr. Worldly and was above all that… but the truth is I’m not and those people are no different then me… their just out to have a good time. I just finished reading the book called Power of Now (which I highly recommend for people as screwed up as me.) one of the things the book talks about is not JUDGING people and not letting your ego (mind) run your life. So me not judging these people as losers or whatever was a start and not letting my ego tell me that I’m too cool for this etc… So with that I decided that this would be a great test for me to see if I could relax and have a good time no matter how much I thought it was lame. Coming to Thailand has become somewhat of right of passage for most of the world’s youth other then the United States (all though I have been meeting more people from the US which is a good thing) so you tend to get a nice mixture of people from all over the world. Unfortunately for me I didn’t make it here for the Full Moon party… but instead the Half Moon Party. Back some 20 years ago it was only the Full Moon party… but since its popularity and Thai’s quick thinking they now have a party ever week…. Black moon, Half Moon, some other kind of moon… and so on. These parties are known to last until the following night, but like the true idiot I am we got there around 10pm and it was just starting, but it didn’t get really busy until about 2am and at that point I couldn’t even see straight. We started out the night with the traditional black light face painting, I opted for the kiss prints on my cheeks. One thing that I didn’t realize was the Half Moon Party was in the jungle and not that beach… I wish someone would have told me that so I could have brought the bug spray! So after getting our faces and bodies painted we head straight to the bar for the famous “Buckets” not sure who started this drink but here in Thailand and a few other places in South East Asia they serve you a drink in a bucket with a bunch of straws. One of the common and cheapest buckets is the Thai whiskey/Red Bull/Coke. It didn’t take long for a few of these buckets to kick in, I was clearly light years drunker then everyone else… and now “I” was becoming that drunken backpacker I hated soo much. In the end I had a great time, met a bunch of nice people and learned a lesson or two in life. 1) Don’t judge people, cause in the end your more alike then you ever would think. 2) Pace yourself with those buckets… there’s no race… the parties last forever! And finally 3) after a night of partying in Ko Phan-ngan…. don’t board a boat the following day bound for the open ocean!
And that was my experience of the parties on Ko Phan-ngan Thailand!
Posted by Jimmy under Photos, Thailand, Travel Tips, Uncategorized, Updates |
