LUNCAY: Scenes From Full Moon Party

Disclaimer: Much of the following will read as critical of the Full Moon Party on Haad Rin beach in Koh Phangan, Thailand. But make no mistake, I do not consider myself above this event. I participated in the Full Moon Party. I am complicit in the Full Moon Party. I enjoyed the Full Moon Party. Here we go:

5:00PM Consciousness: The party might take place at night, but preparing for it is a daylong ordeal. Especially when you’re attacking this thing north of 30. A proper diet and hydration regimen is recommended. And sleeping at some point in the day is all but a prerequisite. The goal here is essentially to make yourself nocturnal, so if you have to hang from the ceiling with your arms across your chest, you do what it takes. Blackout curtains are standard issue at hotels close to Haad Rin, and we’re not ones to pass on a thoughtful amenity. We awoke from our daylight slumber at 5:00PM, delirious, but still mission oriented.

10:00PM Roadside Reflectors: Our hotel made it explicit that no body painting was to take place in our room. It’s remarkable that not only is the practice of slathering blacklight-sensitive designs on one’s person so popular during this party that it necessitated a sign in our room prohibiting it, but also that I felt obligated to grammatically analyze said sign, noting that it specified “painting” was forbidden and not the paint itself. Which meant we could return to our room visible from space as long as we did not apply the radioactive waste within our quarters. Understood.

After our songathew dropped us a safe distance from the mayhem (like an old fisherman wary of shark infested waters, he wouldn’t dare bring closer than a five minute walk to the beach) we noticed several roadside body painting stations and decided to get our luminescence on. The scene was almost cute in its juvenility. A folding table set up on the side of a dirt road in with small paint cups of all the pretty colors you could want, paint brushes for everyone to share, and a helpful washing dish so as not to muddle the phosphorescent slurries together (you wouldn’t want to look stupid). We put some tasteful dots on our skin. I may have written “Megatrip” on my arms. And we moved on, likely led-poisoned, definitely glow-in-the-dark, and somehow also more inconspicuous.

10:10PM Land Of The Free:
There is a ticket counter at the entrance to the beach town that charges 100 Baht for you to enter, a laughable amount considering the lengths to which many travelers have gone to be at this party. Just after paying and receiving our wristbands, I was approached by a 20-year-old British bro with a lopsided smile and dilated pupils who appeared to have appointed himself to the position of greeter at the Full Moon Party. Why anyone would want that job, I don’t know, but he proceeded to give me a hug, spout some gibberish my ear, and finish by welcoming me to the “land of the free”. Just before I could drop some corrective Hamilton quotes on him, he shuffled past me and repeated the process to Sara, word for word, sweaty embrace for sweaty embrace, misplaced passion for misplaced passion. We got out of there before he could give us a “Make Koh Phangan Great Again” hat.

10:30PM Dinner On The Edge Of Nothingness: Pizza had been part of our plan for weeks. Filling, absorbent, relatively bacteria-proof, and also fucking pizza, it felt like the only logical pairing for the bodily harm we’d be inflicting on ourselves that night. So we found a well-rated Italian place in Haad Rin town, on what was probably once a pleasant street, but which the party, only a block away, had now rendered a hauntingly barren alley full of long shadows, lonely echoes, and probably an abandoned rocking horse for some reason. The Full Moon Party is a land of extremes, and nowhere within its radius is exempt from dutiful participation. You’re either a drug-fueled Mad Max orgy with lasers, or you’re a Cormac McCarthy novel about litter and sadness. And you wont return to whatever middle ground you once occupied until around 9:00AM the next morning.

So here we were, actually feeding ourselves in what was the proverbial homeless village underneath Full Moon Party Highway. And like any respectable homeless village, people were sleeping there. Directly across from the establishment cooking our food was one of the most desolate looking hostels I’ve ever seen. The building was a concrete slab that would have been considered “the depressing one” in a Soviet bloc neighborhood. And from this divorce hearing of a structure, rusty metal doors would occasionally open, nothing behind them but darkness, and lines of waddling partiers would emerge single file, heading obediently for the beach. Worker drones leaving to collect the day’s chemically altered honey. One after another, until the doors slammed shut on the yawning void within. A clown car if Bozo drove a hearse.

The pizza was pretty good though.

11:03PM: The Beach: Disclaimer: We had been on Haad Rin beach before. About 3 times actually. During day and night. And I honestly think our previous visits made this entry even more shocking.

Once we fully emerged from the narrow alleyway of hostels, noodle stands, and bucket shops, and the full scope of this thing was laid out in front of us, it took several moments to actually compute. Gone was the sandy beach we had peacefully lazed on watching parasailers only a day before. In its place was a pulsating mass of bodies stretching outward to the sea and onward toward an endpoint undetectable. The sound was astoundingly convoluted. Blaring electronics with a bass so forceful the rest of the music didn’t make sense anymore. Each 50-foot section of the beach was dominated by another soundscape attempting to outdo the last both in volume and visceral soul battery.

And the colors. The crowd was a writhing mass of shifting deep-sea luminance and college dorm room posters fed into a woodchipper. Every so often you thought you identified the furthest boundary of the human undulation, only to have an oscillating yellow spotlight reveal a previously unseen horde, even more vibrant and insane than the one surrounding it. If you weren’t taking something to give you synesthesia, you were feeling it anyway. When people talk about overload of the senses, I will use this as the new baseline for which to compare.

11:16PM Drop In The Bucket: We acquire our first bucket, the laughably appropriate unit of alcohol at FMP. Buckets are beach pails containing half a bottle of liquor and two small mixer cans of your choosing, and also some neon straws as a garnish. The bucket not only aligns with the party’s shoreline setting, but also embodies the perversion of innocence that is the event’s bread and butter. A child’s toy, whose once primary function was earth-based castle construction, is now a gleefully ironic vessel for alcohol poisoning. This is what your stuffed animals talk about when you leave the room. This is what happens to your day at the beach during the nighttime.

They are also pretty dangerous, not only for their absurd volume capacity, or the deceptive sweetness of their contents, but for the potentially inviting diameter of their opening. Winking nods to family friendly sands, yes, but they are also aptly-named, under-monitored basketball hoops for anyone with a mean streak, an illicit substance, and a solid jump shot. So when I felt our bucket jostle as a particularly aggressive looking bropacker shouldered past me, I immediately looked down at his hands. The one closest to my sloshing mobile lake of alcohol was crumpled into an awkward ball. It then used two free fingers (while keeping the others tightly clasped) to open to a zippered pocket on his shorts, enter it briefly, and then reemerge, uncoiled, fingers fully free to zip the pocket shut.

I probably let too many horror stories get in my head. It was likely nothing more than a drunk imbecile in a crowded alley. But on this beach, on this night, why on earth roll a pair of dice with roofies instead of snake eyes? I poured the bucket in the trash, and bought a new one 3 minutes later. That’s other laughable thing about buckets. They cost about $2.50.

11:46PM Ocean Toilet: There are bathrooms located in Haad Rin town, but they are undesirable in so many ways. Absolutely foul conditions, lack of proximity to the beach, and worst of all they cost precious Baht to use, which could go toward a boat back home, some clean drinking water, or another portable trash can of NamSong and taurine. But the real reason people eschew porcelain at the Full Moon Party is that they have the world’s biggest urinal right in front of them. And both men and women speckle the shallows, squatting, standing, hiariously hiding behind barely anchored boat taxis, making the water a little more green than it was the day before. Yes, in the moment of contentious bathroom rights debates, the Haad Rin beach is the most gender neutral pisser on the planet, making us all look equally idiotic and gross. It occurs to me during my first of several uses of the ocean toilet, as a rapidly rising tide was sending whatever I, and several others in front of me, were throwing into it straight back into our ankles, that I swam in that water the day before. And enjoyed it.

12:01AM Unconsciousness: It’s around this time that unconscious people start becoming more and more prevalent in Haad Rin. Sometimes it’s in a cozy, un-crowded spot on the beach just waiting for the unpredictable tides to provide a new aqueous blanket. But just as often, it looks like people just pass out mid-action, like waiting in line for a drink, dancing, peeing. As if an atom bomb forever froze them in the exact position they were in at the moment of detonation. Tragic and quotidian, apparitional and strangely poetic, but also immature and shameful to the highest degree. A fortune cookie with “boobies” written on the paper.

12:33AM Ocean Sex: Of course not everyone reacts to these conditions by entering a vegetative state. Down at the far end of the beach in the Paradise Bungalow section, arguably the most energetic district in Speedball County, we witnessed what will likely be the most bizarre and gratuitous display of affection we’ll ever see. The dancing was chaotic and crowded, reaching all the way back into the water far enough that people resorted to gyrating on flimsy stilted platforms a few feet above the waves. Several yards away from this was a young couple, a word I use only because I don’t know what else to call them, and because I honestly wish them the best. To put it delicately, these two were engaged in saltwater coitus in full view of literally everyone. The ravers on the beach, the boat taxi drivers parked right next to them, the row of people using the ocean toilet a few feet in front of them. Everyone.

Their conditions were far from ideal, but dammit if they weren’t determined. Slipping off of one another every few seconds, fumbling around in the shifting sea, tuning out taunts and encouragements from the thousands of people who glanced in their direction, ignoring the physically unsustainable rhythm of the techno music. We didn’t stay longer than it took to realize what was happening, convince ourselves it couldn’t possibly be, and than see something or other than 100% confirmed it was, but I like to think we saw the beginning of something beautiful. What a story that child would have.

1:40AM The Circle: A man was sitting on the ground inside a circle he drew around himself in the sand. He was crying hysterically. And screaming. But mostly crying. Oddly most passerbys, including us, respected the boundary of his sand circle as if it were an electric fence. One woman was brave enough to pass the barrier and to comfort him with a friendly embrace. She made sure not to break the circle as she stepped over.

1:14AM Firefight: Fire is every bit as important to the Full Moon Party as sand, water, or ecstasy. Fire ignites the iconic signs at either end of the beach, evoking a savage, otherworldly ritual; a pagan sacrifice to the God of Moon and Mushrooms. Fire engulfs the kerosene soaked jumprope at Paradise; a contraption Kevin McCallister would devise to keep bad guys away, but that for some reason here, dozens of partiers incapable of hopping anything but a curb convince themselves they could master in seconds. Which they can not. And finally, fire spews in all directions from the various fire performers on the beach.

These kinds of shows are commonplace in all Thai islands, but landing a gig at FMP must be equivalent to making it to the Super Bowl. Other shows we have seen in our travels all seemed quaint compared to what we saw here. The ridiculous contraptions of molten entertainment on display ranged from multi-pronged batons launching both flame and white sparks in a 360 (and third) degree shower of light, a basketball-sized fire yo-yo designed to be slung toward a crowd of people and reeled back at the last second, and a nightmarish wizard staff that when pressed into the sand would erupt in a mushroom cloud of incandescence singeing the eyebrows of anyone foolish enough to watch. All of these weapons of mass combustion, for any reasonable person, would serve as giant billboards advertising “Not To Be Fucked With.” But this is Full Moon Party, and conventional wisdom is busy dropping acid in the black hole hostel by the pizza place.

Several abnormally tight dudes, most of them holding cameras pointed at their own faces, would strut across the performance circle mid-fire-throw, blaze-catch, or flame-belch, all with the same “double tap this vid” smirk on their face. The performers tried not to react for the most part, but eventually, as he always does at this party, one guy took it too far.

When a borderline insanely tight guy did his cross-the-circle routine during a particularly daring behind-the-back catch stunt involving a flaming candelabra that resembled a medieval torture instrument, the performer had finally had enough. After the interference caused him to botch the trick, he picked up his white-hot, kaleidoscopic trident off the sand and started storming toward the still-filming tight guy with Dwayne Johnson-esque purpose. When the crowd’s worried yelps alerted His Tightness to his imminent branding, he quickly aborted his act and stumbled away high-stepping in fear. But this wasn’t for show. The fire wielder was pissed. He proceeded to chase this drunk asshole down the beach for about 100 yards, thrusting a multi-pointed flaming spike in his face, screaming at him in Thai, and belittling him in the most satisfying way possible.

I’m not exactly sure how his fire trick was supposed to end. But I’m pretty sure he nailed it.

2:36AM Frequency: It now hits us. This happens here every month. Every god damn month. Oktoberfest happens once a year. Same with Carnival. Same with Mardi Gras. The Full Moon Party happens 12 times a year. And that’s not counting the ancillary half, new, and dark moon parties that happen on the same beach. This is always going on. You could be drinking Sunday morning coffee and yelping different brunch restaurants, and on the other end of the world, there’s a very decent chance people are here doing this.

Something else now hits us. What if our Full Moon Party is one of the tamer ones?

2:67AM Runaway: While the Full Moon Party can often be fertile ground for romance, or at least some animalistic approximation of it, once you get to a certain hour in the night, you have to be just as careful to avoid broken hearts in the sand as broken beer bottles. One such separation, that took place directly in front of us as we enjoyed a recuperative sit in a relatively un-crowded section of sand, was one of the more unique breakups I can think of. It was at once scary, hilarious, and so weird it could only really have happened here.

The now former couple was fighting intensely, and immediately the man made his case for being the villain. He was chest puffing, tiptoeing to leer over his female partner, and at one point he actually grabbed her by the chin to scream more directly into her skull. It was textbook, abusive, auditioning-for-the-role-of-“Husband”-in-Big-Little-Lies stuff, and for a second we thought we were about to witness something terrible. The man even caught our concerned stares out of the corner of his eye and turned to give us some “the fuck you lookin at?” psycho eyes while pretending to carry a heavy duffel in each arm. We cowardly snapped our gaze elsewhere, and the fight continued with the woman gaining more ground both physically and verbally. This obviously wasn’t going to fly for the man, but this was the moment things took an unexpected turn.

The couple turned and started walking down the beach in front of us with the woman still slinging unintelligible verbal barbs and getting her finger as close to the man’s face as possible without poking his eye out. The man kept his attention forward and casually removed his sandals mid-stride, which, given the volatility of the situation, seemed like the least crucial ingredient in this relationship implosion cobbler. But then, without a word and without warning, the man exploded into a rabid full sprint, sandals conveniently in hand, and made like a caffeinated child into the impenetrable, miles-deep wall of intoxicated dance zombies. The woman screamed at him to come back as he dodged staggering bucket chuggers and swaying jay smokers at an impressive full speed. She could have chased him, but she knew it was hopeless. Needles in haystacks are at least stationary and sober. He was gone.

And that’s how we saw a guy break up with his girlfriend by daring her to chase him into the darkest depths of the Full Moon Party. There’s no more definitive, outrageous, and hilarious way to end a relationship. Because make no mistake, no love can recover from that. I can think of a thousand altars I’d rather be left at before Haad Rin beach alone and probably rolling. I can only imagine how that flight home went down.

3:47JM Existentialism: What is the Full Moon Party? Or better yet, why is it? Is this the hippie-invented rejection of civilization it began as only a short 30 years ago? Is it an electronic music festival in an exotic setting? Is it a callous cash grab capitalizing on the nihilism and substance abuse issues of a lost generation? Is it the ultimate manifestation of “once in a lifetime”, “because I can” recklessness borne out of youth, privilege, and perhaps some degree of actual liberation?

4:!7AM Existence: An extremely drunk girl tries multiple times to pee in the ocean and nearly drowns when wave after wave knocks her over mid jean skirt removal. In the morning she will enshrine it as the best night of her life.