The fate of a beach in Thailand, when it became too popular. Could the
Camino Frances suffer a similar fate?
By
Robert Foyle Hunwick
Welcome to Koh Phangan … I guess. The host of tuk-tuk drivers and solicitors who await the tourist ferry-load arriving every hour make no mention of the actual island. It’s all about the party. Or rather, part
ies. Every night.
The next greeting is a giant billboard that warns, “MARIJUANA AND MAGIC MUSHROOMS ARE ILLEGAL IN THAILAND.” Bottom-right is a photograph intended to terrify anyone fresh off the boat: a white-haired foreigner, eyes blacked out, seated before a bunch of cops. Oddly, one policeman flashes a sinister grin.
Minutes later, our minivan filled with backpackers bounces down the 10-kilometer road toward Haad Rin, where the party happens. Most passengers are carrying coffin-sized luggage and look weary. Where’s a copy of the
Daily Mail with the latest about some dead Brit? These kids surely need to be warned.
Koh Phangan’s Full Moon Party long ago lost its original innocence, devolving into a mess of drunken foreigners cramming onto a once-beautiful beach to celebrate nothing more than the party itself. But in recent years, things have gotten much worse. There have been rapes, fatal accidents, suicides, and gang-related murders. “In the nine months I lived there, one guy I admired hung himself, while another died drunk-driving his motorbike,” a former expat told me. Meanwhile, the local environment has been decimated. In fact, one’s first taste of the island pleasures that await can be found in the water itself, which glistens with oil and plastic.
Yet most visitors are blasé about it. “If you’re a
girl walking down the beach, you get
this all the time,” a British voice in the minivan drawls to her Danish companion, making a firm, pinching motion. “My friend gets drunk and throws up … then she’s fine again,” another brays cheerfully.
It’s nearly 3 o’clock in the afternoon, hours before action time, where I might find, as a disgusted
Mail reported, “naked couples bobbing up and down in the water,” a “sordid scene … lit by a beautiful, white full moon,” “a sign saying ‘F*** me,’ ” and “[h]ard drugs.”
This, supposedly, is the best party in Asia.
It wasn’t always like this. The origins of the Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan, which is about 90 percent dense jungle with some gorgeous beaches, are unclear. “The Full-Moon Party started in 1987 or 1988, nobody really knows,” the island’s official guidebook unhelpfully notes, and almost everyone on Koh Phangan has an equally vague explanation for why 30,000 people converge here every month.
The myth is that a farewell party for a dozen tourists somehow mutated into a phenomenon that’s now the island’s virtual
raison d’être. The facts are less tidy, but more interesting. They reach back to the end of the Cold War, where on a remote island, flower-power idealists with Indian monikers muttered about Shiva over some bongos. The waves then were said to sparkle with phosphorescence under a blue moonlight. (Thirty years later, phosphorescence sells for a buck a bottle and no one cares about Vishnu.)
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