I Love the Smell of Kerosene at Midnight

The Koh Phangan Full Moon Parties have a bad reputation, however only one person died at the party we were at.

The night started out with Massey accidentally volunteering to breath fire and after he volunteered, I of course did as well. The way it works is you take a mouthful of kerosene and spit it as hard as you can into a torch you are holding. The result is a huge fireball. We danced on stage, went down water slides, and jumped rope using a rope of fire, not that we had kerosene soaked shirts, mind you. Somehow it has become tradition to sell buckets of alcohol rather than regularly sized drinks. To rent a stall on the beach to sell these buckets from costs $50k a month and the beach is largely deserted except near the half and full moons. That's how big this party was, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people. Despite being the low season, the entire beach became one big pulsating mob by 1:00AM. Our friend, Sam, who had come with us from Bangkok disappeared and finding someone in the haystack was near impossible. Luckily, she bumped into some other friends of ours who helped her back to the hostel. Many people were still on the beach at sunrise, although not all were concious.

We hung out for a couple of days after the party and rented a jeep to drive around the island. We hiked to a couple of advertised waterfalls, which turned out to be quite lackluster, one being little more than a trickle, but the bay on the north end of the island was quite nice. Getting the jeep up and down the steep dirt roads was quite exciting and Sam did a great job driving. At this point, we had also been joined by our Scottish friend Sarah and we all had dinner at a restaurant on the beach on the north end of the island at sunset.