The next day we got a Thai with coconut oil massage to remove the stress of life. Big mistake, after we were covered in coconut oil, we immediately became Thailand’s whole mosquito population free buffet. Our massage consisted in rubs, stretches and probably around 459 slaps to kill a mosquitos, the bad experience didn’t end up there as a group of loud obnoxious drunk people decided to make their party 10 ft from our massage place completely distracting us of reaching our Zen. I hope they be stricken with epilepsy while having open heart surgery for ruining our massage (that was Eitan speaking..the experience wasn’t that bad, it was still decent but the loud people were annoying!).

The full moon was up in the sky and we were ready and excited to party at Haad Rin. The hostel organized a neon body painting session for everybody to be creative and then we took a taxi with a bunch of nice Norwegians. Eitan was quite the artist and drew a sun on Sarah’s arm and paint all over her face.  She looked like quite the full moon lady. The party was around 1 hr away and when we arrived Eitan bought a flashy t-shirt so he can feel like he belongs to the party and we got a bucket of mango raspberry vodka to warm up.

There is about 20,000 people partying in around 10 different bars along the beach, all but one playing the absolute worse of electronic music (hard techo), we luckily found a bar on the far end where there was good house music and more mellow people. We danced, we walked, we danced more and around 5:00 am we headed back to sleep.

Overall we were highly disappointed in this whole experience. The full moon party used to be a place for backpackers to gather and dance until sunrise to beautiful music, an experience where people who were lucky to attend 10 years ago will tell you it changed their lives. But now, this party has been commercialized to a degree where people go here for the only purpose of getting wasted, instead of going here to enjoy the music or the experience. You can see a lot of people completely unconscious laying on the beach, people having sex in public, puking with more power than the exorcist, people getting burned while trying to jump a rope on fire, and overall a “bro” vibe that wasn’t supposed to be here.

What a shame but at least we saw it and made our own opinion of this ”backpackers rite of passage” party. Being lucky enough to have been attended to several festivals and raves around the world, I can tell you that this Full Moon Party is waaay past its expiration date. And Eitan discovered that Sarah is quite a good dancer to house music and is eager to take her to an actually good rave.

Our last day in Koh Pangnan we were surprised that we didn’t sleep all day given we were up til 5am.  We had a relaxing day at the beach.  A fun experience was we bought a lantern to set free into the sky.  Watching it illuminate the sky above the beautiful and calm beach was stunning.  And after our diarrhea experience in Indonesia our wish as we let the lantern go was no more diarrhea this trip (soo romantic!)

Bonus pic of the day: This restaurant really knows their clientele, they just decided to name that section “Alcoholics”.