|
THE SLOW BOAT
leaves Ko Tao, Thailand at 9am sharp. It’s the first boat out and the
only way to get to Ko Pha-Ngan for under 200 baht. I made it onto this
ferry with little more than seconds to spare, continuing a proud tradition
of timing things right. The ride over transmogrified (in the Calvin &
Hobbes tradition) me into a cat, again. It’s
becoming a frequent occurrence here in Thailand. but I’m not fighting
it. I got comfortable on top of the boat – took off my shirt, arranged
my backpack and curled up as Ko Tao slowly rolled by me. To laze in the
sun on top of a boat at 9:30 on a Monday morning on the Gulf of Thailand
is not a bad thing.
It was a long, vicissitudinous ride. About 90 minutes into it our boat was passed by some high rollers’ VIP Catamaran. It had departed Ko Tao 30 minutes after us and arrived before us, but I’m old school, check it, and I’ll keep my 70 baht, thank you very much.
We arrived in Thong Sala on Ko Pha-Ngan with the usual amiable fan-fare - "Hello my friend! Where are you going today?! Taxi! Had Rin! Pineapple! Beer!". I chose a non-aggressive sâwngthâew (pick-up with two benches in the back) with three other farang (foreigners) and quickly sped off.
The road linking the two most important economic and social centers on the island would be represented on a U.S. roadmap with a faint dotted line, if at all. [Ed. Note: it would be better if there was no road there at all…] But since Thailand is a wonderfully second world country, the inclines are severe, the muddy potholes can hide a basketball and the curves are definitely not banked for his pleasure. It was another fun ride and soon I was at ground zero: Had Rin.
I generally have in innate gift of finding the best accommodation in any given area, but my instincts served up mixed results this time. After waiting for a boat taxi to take me up the coast for too long, I decided to look in Had Rin, which famously had no vacancies on FMP nights. I jumped on the back of a motorbike to explore the Leela Beach area, and after investigating a few mountaintop bungalows, I found huts for me and my team down on the beach. They were simple, rustic and quite open air, but this was one of the 12 nights out of the year when finding a room in Had Rin was simply impossible. Hype is hype, so don’t always believe everything tell you about places they haven’t been. I paid the $30 for the three rooms, then bee-lined down to the beach for a quick dip in the aquamarine water. I dined on a nice plate of Pad Thai, washed down with a Singha, then felt that I had earned the right to curl up on a soft patch of white sand on the beach. I followed this with another lengthy swim. It would be another long, unpredictable night; a disco nap would serve me well…
A few hours later I followed the wooden walkway, elevated over the large limestone boulders and crashing surf, to the lighthouse. There were a few clouds in the crossfire of the setting sun, so I found a seat with a backrest and watched the western sky glow with anticipation. The sun descended until it was an impossible orange disc sitting on the horizon, just as it had done the previous night in Ko Tao. Day turned to dusk and my thirst grew strong. I had six people to greet shortly and they were advised to find me at the beachside bar. The long day’s journey into night had begun.
A nervous apprehension filled the air. It’s like having your birthday on New Year’s Eve. You can’t help but have great expectations, especially if you have no idea what is about to happen. I had culled information on the FMP from a multitude of sources, but I still had no idea what to expect. What would you think Burning Man was going to be like if you were going tonight? I knew the basic formula – 6,000 to 8,000 people, laced with various natural and unnatural stimulants, a dozen or so DJ stands on the beach, warm water, cheap supplies and a Red Bull formula called Theoplex that was banned in the United States. I felt like Hunter S. Thompson driving through Barstow, Las Vegas only a quarter pint of ether away. I sat on the beach, listening to Punjabi DJ on the oversize speakers behind me. Leela Beach is one of the unofficial pre-parties, but the full moon was already arisin’. The cantina sold me a large Chang for 60 baht, well below island standards, especially for a lucrative evening like this. I drank deeply and watched the small speedboats arrive from Samui.
Scott, Pauline, Aaron and David arrived shortly. We were to meet Christine and Ian later. I showed them to their digs for the evening. Apparently the bungalows I procured for them made them all lower their standards of acceptable accommodation. I was proud of this, considering the three New Yorkers had just come through Cambodia and Vietnam. "Toughen up, mate!", as they would say if we were in New Zealand. Aaron countered, "Actually I stayed in a few places like this in Mexico,". These bungalows were most likely only rented one night a month, and that’s probably why the spiders had gotten so comfortable. I reminded them that there was a little party on the beach just over the hill and we didn’t need to get too comfortable. I figured that if we returned after sunrise, slept for a few hours, then reconvened on the excellent beach, conscious time in the bungalow could be limited to ten minutes or less.
I headed down to the beach along the rickety wooden walkway with Scott to the Lighthouse Restaurant. The Lighthouse was a bit further down the point, up on the hill, but it didn’t look like it was on tonight. Scott and I ordered some Kanompaung Na Koong with prawns, also a Tom Kha soup with fish. We sipped on Chang beers and Scott began ordering Vodka and Red Bulls. We talked with the people working there. One of the women was going to had over to Orchid Bar to work from 2-6am. I think people on Ko Pha-Ngan make a week’s worth of money on FMP nights.
Around 10pm we wished the staff a happy and lucrative evening and made our way back to the bungalows. The rest of the crew was putting on their game faces, slowly, so I coerced David back to the bar on Leela Beach for some more Theoplex Red Bull and beers. We played on the tire swing like eight year olds, just as I’d seen farang do all afternoon. An impossibly large moon cast [an] eerie dawn pallor over the beach and the water. It was enough light to drive, almost to write. We could hear the music creep over the hill. I felt like an eight year old, again, this time forced to stay home on Halloween while my Jehovah Witness mother explained to princesses and pirates that this household most certainly did not participate in Devil’s night. But I was in costume as a Full Moon Partier – swim trunks and an unbuttoned shirt – and the biggest party on earth was occurring a five minute walk away. We marched over the hill anxiously, then ditched our flip-flops and made a vague plan if any of us got lost. We entered the fray at Paradise Bungalows – where the FMP started ten years ago. Their bungalows looked considerably worse than the ones we were staying in, but don’t judge a bungalow by its corrugated steel.
The party was overwhelming. The beach extended over a quarter mile and it was packed with partiers. The music looked like it changed every fifty yards or so where another big club had spilled out onto the beach. I could see Poi dancers exhibit their pyrotechnics at various points. Many people were swimming; many people were walking around dripping wet, almost naked, eyes as big as dinner plates. I felt like a kid in a candy store. We bought drinks and started walking through the crowd. 8,000 people were expected that night. It was sensory overload. We passed Bongo Club, Drop In, Vinyl Club, Cactus Club, Orchid and Tommy’s. The people dancing in the clubs spilled out onto the beach and eventually into the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand. Enterprising Thai sold buckets containing a bottle of Sangsom whisky, a 1.5L of coke then filled the bucket with ice. For 200 baht - $5 - they are a cost-effective way to get 3-4 people into character. We sampled Sangsom and RBV buckets. Outside the Orchid Bar we found Christine and Ian. We talked with a girl who claimed to be from Yosemite. That might be a good line for people only vaguely familiar with Yosemite, and when we pressed her for details she conceded that she was actually from Southern California but worked in Yosemite National Park last summer. I talked with another girl from England. She was dancing by herself and had an unusual style to her. Pauline liked it and started chatting her up. Later she gave me some good advice on Prachuap Khiri Khan.
Several Thai offered to sell ecstasy to me. They said it was ecstasy, but it could have been anything. I’d been warned about the drug scene many times. There were apparently plain clothes police officers working the party. Things like entrapment and just cause are not as important here in Thailand as in other countries. The price tag for escaping a small pot bust is 50,000B ($1250). I was also warned of tôn lamphong, a plant related to Patura. Guesthouses were passing it off as mushrooms in tea, brownies and spaghetti. Legend has it that it reduces the subject to an itinerant zombie, scratching at the air for several days. These victims get taken to a psychiatric hospital in Suratthani. They have to add staff for every FMP. Fortunately tôn lamphong is till legal in Thailand.
Despite the existence of marijuana, X, mushrooms, mystery drugs and over the counter uppers, the party did not feel like a drug party. Booze seemed to be the stimulant of choice, cut with Theoplex and chased with swims in the water. I went swimming that night, though I had little to do with it. It was perhaps the most surreal, or Dadaist moment in recent memory.
Andy Warhol would have appreciated this Cabaret Voltaire. I had walked into the water a bit to get away from the party for a moment and revel in the incredible 180° dichotomy I was a part of. On one half 8,000 people raged with prodigious force: Multicolored lights, a mélange of pulsating techno, a sea of life and energy. On the other side were the serene warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand. The bay was illuminated under the moon’s rays and small sets of waves lazily spiraled onto the beach. I stood looking out over the water, up at the stars, when a tremendous force hit my from behind. I was underwater, as much as I could be in a foot of water. I quickly came to and got to my knees. A blonde woman in a black bikini towered over me with a crazed look in her eyes. She lunged again, knocking me back into the water. I took her with me this time. She got up and ran back up the beach and into the crowd. I kneeled in the water in disbelief. As soon as she disappeared she was back, running at full speed at me again. I took her low and picked her up and spun her. We spiraled into the water con mucho gusto. I realized then that I had lost my pocketbook, and my shirt had been forcibly removed by my assailant. She was relentless. She was neither ferocious nor excited or even very responsive. She would not respond to any of my inquiries - "Who are you?! ", "What are you doing?! ", "Who sent you?! ", "Can you chill the fuck out for a minute?! ".
I don’t know what country she was from - except that it is a rugby playing country – or what her angle was, but she had come to wrassle. She made many trips up onto the beach to get a running start on her creative attacks. But she had found a worthy adversary in me, and her little war of attrition was wearing her out. She lay in the water, plugginer her ears and looking at me menacingly.
"Tell me who you work for! ", I yelled.
She got up and ran up the beach, never to be seen from again. I’d lost my shirt and retrieved my Moleskine notebook from the shore. Only a queen’s ransom of karmic wealth brought the book back to me. It’s a treasure chest of notes, phone numbers and email addresses, itineraries and scribbled notes written in other languages during nights not wholly accounted for. Who knows what disasters could unfold if it got into the wrong hands.
The primordial beast was strong in Geil. Like a vampire on a full moon, she’d passed some of her madness onto me. I stammered through the beach stunned, lost, wild. I decided to search the beach to locate my fellow droogs. I looked for 20 minutes or so, maybe more, trying to process the scenes unfolding in the eye of the hurricane. People were drawing on each other with highlighters, paint, and mascara brushes. Lady-boys mixed in with the farang from a hundred countries, trying to get them to drink some of their suspicious bucket.
I eventually located my posse. I did a terrible job explaining what had happened and they accused me of scoring tôn lamphong. I denied it, but couldn’t speak for my adversary. Scott wanted to head home, so I walked him back after we drank a beer and ate a slice of pizza. I grabbed a shirt and returned to the party, cognizant that I’d lost everyone else, but confident I’d find someone I knew. It was just pre-dawn. I walked the beach and reveled in the immensity of it. The going had gotten strange and the party was peaking. Beats thumped out from clubs, people swam in the ocean, buckets were still being emptied and many people looked lost. The diluted black of night dulled into the shades of morning on Ko Pha-Ngan Island. I sat down on the sand to take in the commedia dell’arte. There were staggering imbroglios, rising crescendos, agonizing vibrato – all contributing to the verismo opéra comique. It finally culminated with a powerful burning orb rising from the hill just east of Had Rin Nok, known to the FM partiers as Sunrise Beach. Shouts of cries were heard all along the beach. Music was turned up and people ran into the water. The only Sun had risen again, and the curtain had fallen on the Full Moon. The FM party was now officially over, so people segued into the "Sunrise After FMP". This would last until 11 or 12, when Backyard BBQ would start at Coco’s up on the hill. That was slated to go to sundown, and that’s when the after-hours parties would get into gear. As the sun slowly rose in the east I was reminded of my mantra and adage, my guiding principal and the prevailing current in P.L. – Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.
|
