Koh Phangan

Laura’s and my plans in Thailand were structured around the date of September 23rd, when the monthly Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan would be going down. So I booked tickets to Bangkok on the 21st, giving me a day and half to make it to the island (considering that I wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 9:30 pm). This also happened to be my 23rd birthday, so in spite of my late arrival and early departure, I was intent on spending the night in Bangkok city rather than Bangkok airport. By the time I made it to my hostel, however, it was already midnight, and I needed to be heading back to the airport at four, and the hostel was fairly deserted and I didn’t feel like exploring Bangkok by myself. So I hung out out back with some of the staff members, chatting and enjoying the lovely view of Bangkok’s Rama 8 bridge.

After traversing the sketchy maze of back alleys from my hostel to the main road, I caught a taxi with no problem and before I knew it was on my 6:50 flight to Surat Thani. From there I took a bus to a Koh Phangan-bound ferry (the whole while, I might add, lugging around my enormous amounts of baggage…); to the luggage-rack-covered-bed pickup trucks that serve as taxis on the island; to my awesome mountain-side jungle bungalow.

poor guy heaving up my massive bag

view from our bungalow

ours was the furthest left

Our side of the island was relatively quiet and had lots of beautiful flora and fauna; including an elephant I saw on the side of the road when a guy from the hostel was taking me to the bank on his motorbike (not a native resident of the island, but still not something you expect to see when riding along the beach) and the hostel’s pet monkey Mario, who was a little rascal, but oh-so-cute.

While waiting for Laura the first afternoon I found myself at a really beautiful secluded beach during sunset, where I was more or less by myself with the exception of the two kids piling seaweed on a float and the kite surfer instructor riding around in the shallows with his two dogs. We were to find that this wasn’t representative of the entire island, but enjoyed our little paradise away from all the craziness on the other side (which I’ll get to in a different post).

laying in wait

hahaha… i love this progression