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So we set out on our journey - and what a journey it was! We'd succesfully barted down the price of our bus and boat ticket from 1100 baht each to 700 baht each (just under £15) even though we weren't entirely sure we could have got it lower, we were pleased we managed to save some pennies (well actually it was Candy's world famous bartering skills that had done it so not really 'we') We were picked up at 7.30am in the morning from our hotel and were on the bus for 5 hours, arriving at the bus waiting station at 12.30pm. Although long, the journey hadn't been too bad - we'd discovered we were travelling with two gingers! We even said to eachother 'What are the chances two friends our travelling together that are both ginger?' - then we remembered Hayley and Kelly! This isn't meant to be offensive to gingers of the world - we love them, we've just got in the habit of pointing them out to eachother. Anyway... we were at the bus/waiting station and were told we had to wait two hours until we were collected. This place was small with rickety tables and chairs and not a particularly pleasant small - we weren't really looking forward to the wait. Emma then went to the toilet and by the look on her face when she returned, was not impressed. Candy has issues with the hygiene of toilets abroard (which you may have noticed). And has yet to have use a public one since we've been way. Emma doesn't mind so much but if she was not happy then Candy definately wouldn't be. But it would be another 8 hours before we knew we'd be somewhere with a toilet so the worst had to happen - Candy had to use a non-flushing public toilet. This is big news people. After psyching herself up for a while, she eventually went to the toilet!Candy was so proud of herself that she even wanted to take a picture of the toilet. Emma managed to change her mind though. We then waited over 2 hours to be collected by coach.
Once we'd all loaded on the coach (throughout the 2 hours various bus loads of people had been dropped off at the waiting station) it became very apparent that there were not enough seats for the number of people. The solution? To grab a couple of plastic chairs and put them in the aisles! Luckily we had got on early and managed to get two coach seats - some unlucky guys though had to spend the entire journey sitting on garden furniture. After an hour we got to the pier and onto the boat. There was a 'VIP' luxury top deck, basically for 40 baht (roughly 80p) extra you could have more comfortable seats and air con. As the last boat trip has been so horrendous and we'd been on the bottom deck - we opted for the VIP section. It ended up being a very wise decision, we has 2 seats each and neither of us got sea sick. Although it was the longest boat trip we'd done to date, it was much better!
Whilst on the boat a man was offering taxi rides from the pier to people's hotels. Emma told him what hotel we were at and he said that they already had two people going there so could take us 'no problem'. This seemed ideal and saved us getting a taxi sorted once we were there. So Emma made the executive decision to buy two tickets for the taxi - Candy was not present as she was having another one of her 'spiritual moments' on the deck outside. So when we stepped off the pier we were lead to our taxi/tuk tuk. Question - how many people can you fit in a tuk tuk? Answer - as many as they want! There were alot of us all squeezed in together and when there physically wasn't anymore room, we were off. We were right at the back and tuk tuk's are quite open, so we hung on for dear life. To say the roads in Koh Phangnan are 'hilly' would be an understatement. The driver literally had to slow to a halt to prepare the vehicle to get up some of the hills! And they didn't really slow down when going down the hills so lets just say it was interesting! On one piece of relatively flat road, we swung road a corner and a bag from the top of the tuk tuk (thats where they're all loaded) came flying off into the road! After the initial 'Oh no someone's bag has come off!' Emma realised that it was, infact, HER bag that had come flying off! She, along with everyone else in the tuk tuk, started shouting at the driver to stop. When this didn't work, everyone started banging on the back of the driver's cab and we all carried on shouting. Eventually, he stopped and Emma jumped off and started running after her bag. As she was running, she was joined by two barking dogs running along with her. Thinking they were chasing her, she stopped, only for them to stop aswell! We think they might have just been running along for the hell of it as we're pretty sure they didn't care about her bag. Emma then carried on running until she got to her bag that had been kindly picked up by a couple behind us on a scooter. Once she'd got her bag back, we both held it with us in the tuk tuk. Luckily there wasn't anything breakable in there!
After a little more driving (and clinging on!) the tuk tuk stopped in the middle of some shops, thinking that it was making it's first hotel drop we stayed seated until the driver indicated for all of us to get off. Confused, we all did. He unloaded all our bags and people started to disperse. There were some other people looking equally as confused as us, asking where we were. The driver looked at them blankly. Emma then asked where our hotel was and we'd been told we were getting dropped there. The driver just shrugged and got back into his tuk tuk! So we were left in the middle of nowhere in Koh Phangnan! We wandered around for a bit and come across a hotel, they luckily were really nice and called our hotel for us to come and pick us up. After another 45 minutes of waiting, a driver arrived for us. Emma is no longer in charge of sorting taxi journeys!
We got to the hotel (eventually) and checked in 13 hours after we started our journey. We were exhausted. And felt like we needed a nice shower... cut to us getting in our room and discovering that our shower was partially outside! The toilet is in a seperate room with a see through door, which the shower also has. Part of the wall of the shower was open which meant that you could see out and yep, you guessed it, people could see in. But over the next few days we got used to it and didn't think too much about it, must be us getting into the traveller mind-set!
The following evening we went down to dinner really excited as any minute now, the gingers were due to turn up! We kept watching the door (so much so that a waiter came over to see what was going on!) After a while they arrived looking really tired - they'd been travelling for 24 hours from Kuala Lumpur. We'd been exhausted after 13 so they'd done nearly double that! We ordered them a much needed burger and chips whilst they checked in, pleased that the gingers had arrived safely.
The following evening we headed to the main beach (where the full moon party takes place) to check out the bars. We went to one bar where they were had a 'skipping rope of fire'. Literally a skipping rope that on fire. Two guys swung it whilst anyone who wanted to could attempt to keep up skipping whilst they gradually swung it faster and faster. Several people couldn't and burnt various body parts whilst trying to keep up. But no serious burns happened and all of them were attempting again a few minutes later. It was very entertaining to watch but none of us were brave (or stupid?) enough to have a go!
One evening Candy noticed that a small lizard she'd seen a few days before, was still on the window to our toilet. There was a mosquito mesh screwed to the window and it looked like the lizard was snuck underneath this against the glass. So it was time for Lizard Rescue 2! We had to grab a stool from inside as the window was quite high up and Emma stood on to inspect exactly where this lizard was stuck. She saw that it was inbetween the glass and mesh. So we had to unscrew the mesh frame from the wall to set it free. Whilst Emma was going back inside to get something to unscrew it with, she noticed something sitting inbetween the slats of an empty wooden umbrella pot. Grabbing a torch, we took a further look and found that it was a toad! It was half hanging out the front of the pot and half hanging out the back. It also looked stuck. So we had two rescue missions! Emma got some tweezers and Candy unscrewed the mesh frame. The small lizard didn't move for freedom as we'd hoped so after some coaching we eventually got it out onto the wall. The first rescue mission accomplished, we set about trying to free the toad. Only it had gone, so wasn't stuck as we first thought. It was at the bottom of the umbrella pot, we weren't sure if it was able to get out so very carefully and slowly we put the pot on it's side so it could happily hop out whenever it wanted to. We're not sure if the toad really appreciated our help but the next day it was gone so we had helped it get out in our way. We're sure it was grateful in the end. So we'd done our good deeds for the day!
We also had another friend join us the morning after the gingers arrived. We woke up to find a ginger cat asleep on our balcony (we'd gone 7 days without a cat friend so we guess it was about time!) So we had many ginger friends around us all of a sudden. We opened the door to the balcony to stroke the cat but we think it preferred being left alone. We left it some water and left the door open incase it wanted to come inside but we soon discovered, it preferred being left alone to sleep. So we obliged (we still said hello every morning though)
The night of the Full Moon Party arrived and we'd decided to go all out with the neon paint! We'd managed to find a pot of 6 colours and paint brushes quite cheap, worked out better to do it ourselves as just one neon painting cost upwards of 200 baht to have done on the beach, we could get buckets for cheaper! We also purchased Full Moon Party t-shirts. So that evening we went down to the Full Moon Party buffet that our hotel was putting on. We also met Patrick and Jarred - some friends Kelly and Hayley had met when they were in Singapore. It was whilst we were sitting with them that Emma started to eat one of her chicken skewers. On these skewers there were pieces of tomatoes, onions and (what Emma believed to be) asparagus. Emma doesn't really like asparagus but thought she'd pop a piece in her mouth anyway. It wasn't asparagus. It was a chilli. Emma doesn't like spicy food at all so this was an unpleasant suprise. But she didn't notice straight away that it was a chilli so she kept on chewing. When she did realise she had to keep chewing as there were 2 people sitting at the table that she'd just met and couldn't exactly spit it out and explain that she thought she was eating asparagus. The girls know that Emma is stupid but she didn't want the guys to know that just yet! So with a flaming burning mouth Emma left the table and went to the room to flush out her mouth with water. Then it was on to the party.....
Full Moon Party was amazing! It was full of people but not so packed that you couldn't breathe. There were so many bucket stalls we lost count and loads of fire dancing. There was good music pumping out of every bar and everyone was there to just have a good time. We'd heard some horror stories about Full Moon before we went and we have to say, from what we experienced, it was nothing like that. All we saw were people covered in neon, drinking and dancing, all wanting to have a good time under the full moon! We got our bucket (we shared our first one) and headed to a crowd for some dancing. It's so strange dancing on a beach in flip flops - but really good! We boogied into the wee hours and had a really great night - took days for the neon paint to come off but was well worth it!
During our stay at our hotel we discovered our very own 'hippie hut' within the grounds on the beach. It was basically a wooden hut with not walls and a small wooden table in the middle. It was lit up at night by a small pink light, giving a nice hippie 'glow' to it all. Candy was obviously very pleased with this discovery as she is slowly turning into a hippie and embracing the hippie mindset. The four of us spent one evening out there with drinks and played cards (we're so rock 'n' roll) and had a really chilled relaxed evening. We will miss our hippie hut!
Overall, we really like Koh Phangnan, although it's not our favourite island we've been too. We're really pleased we went and experienced the Full Moon Party but it seems thats mainly what the island caters to and there isn't much else really going on. The hotel was lovely, had its own beach and nice pool. There was also a really sweet waiter who was saving to go to the UK to study. We enjoyed our stay there but we're ready for the more laid back island of Koh Tao - known as the island of turtles. Hopefully the journey won't take too long either!
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