We took the ferry to Koh Phangan, home of the famous Full Moon Party. It takes about 1.5 hours to get there plus another hour in a truck to get to our hostel Shiralea. Sarah sat next to this nice guy from Texas, Mark, on the ferry and learned about his travel adventures and his experience being a teacher in Thailand. Eitan took this as an opportunity to sleep in silence (as you know, Sarah loves to talk… a lot).

This party hostel has many nice common areas for everybody to hang out and our bungalow had a hammock outside! But it’s very expensive for what they give you as the prices during the full moon party are obviously very inflated.

We combined a couple days in this post as we really didn’t do many activities… just beach time, massages, lots of food and 2 big raves. We needed a few days to relax after Indonesia and Korea but also validated that relaxing on the beach not doing much is not either of our strengths and we were eager for a more active schedule.

Our hostel was located in Haad Yao (Yao beach) on the north part of the island. The beach over there is absolutely gorgeous, just a few restaurants/bars on the beach but not crowded at all. And the sand is so easy to walk on with a more muddy consistency and the water is extremely warm! We ate at the restaurant of this nice beach resort and without asking we acted like we belonged there so we could use their swimming pool as well. Perfect plan for a relaxing day.

We then decided to walk to Haad Salad, a beach 2 km north of our beach. This one was not as nice as ours but we found a nice swing!

Koh Phangan offers many backpacker parties/raves that last all morning; we decided to go to the Full Moon Party and the Jungle Experience. The first one was the Jungle one the day before the full moon.

We arranged a taxi with the hostel with other people and there we went around 11:00 pm. This jungle party has only one stage with good electronic music and an excellent vibe. We had a lot of fun with Nina and Hanna, 2 amazing girls from England, and Eitan could understand their English which is rare for him! This was Sarah’s first rave type (on a small scale) experience and she didn’t hate it and especially loved watching all the people!

There were neon tattoos everywhere!

Many fire bending as well (you can see this almost everywhere in the Thai islands)

On the way back our hostel taxi that was supposed to pick us up didn’t show up so we organized a taxi with everybody else who wanted to go back. The taxi driver was mad at life and gave us a very scary experience; he was driving extremely fast dangerous and even though everybody was screaming at him to slow down. Sarah had a heart attack but we made it to the hostel in 1 piece and learned that we will never ever get into a taxi with an angry human ever again! This is Sarah after the near death experience:

Bonus pic of the day: The Thai currency is called Baht, or how Thai people say it “baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaht”. The king is on all the banknotes and coins and if you step on them it is considered disrespectful to the king and it may land you a few years in jail.