The beach

What do you get when you put thousands of backpackers together on an island for a full moon party? Foolishness. There were bus and train loads of us tourists shipped to the port where ferries brought the 30,000 plus tourists to Koh Phangan to celebrate lunar madness.

I got on an overnight bus from Bangkok in which I was the only American on the double decker bus. (The rest were Europeans.) After talking to the extremely nice French girl seated next to me I drifted asleep, but was jolted awake in the middle of the night for a food stop. I deliriously stumbled over to the food stand and ordered some curried chicken eating across from an English bloke. He started telling me about his travels in India, specifically in the city of Varanasi where all the cremations take place by the Ganges river. As he described the harassment he experienced while stepping on shit in the dirty streets I became anxious and blurted out just that, “I’m getting anxious.” “Do you want a valium pill?” he asked me. “No I’m just going to buy a soda,” I said and dashed away from him.
I had the idea to come to this substance abusing island because two of my brother’s friends told me they were renting a house there. And I had also met the Swiss couple who told me about their yoga center. I ended up spending most of my time with two people I had just met though, two Estonian Hari Krishna dudes.
While seated on the back of my new Estonian friend’s motorcycle I got to ask him, “So what’s the deal with Krishna?” Something I’ve always been wondering ever since I first encountered Hari Krishnas selling their little books of the Bhagavad Gita outside the New York City subway. He told me about the group and also about his life as a famous Estonian musician (I googled him after leaving the island and he is legit) before he renounced his fame for spirituality. He made very good company as we swam in the ocean and waterfalls, visited chinese temple with his other friend with an Estonian name who told me to just call him “Vincent” (that was NOT his real name). The three of us would sit together and sing kirtans, or devotional songs, continuing my post-ashram chanting craze.
I also did some yoga at the center that the couple told me about while I was there. But this was yoga with a different slant. The swami at the ashram where I stayed in India was celibate, as I thought all swamis were, until I arrived to “Agama yoga center” which apparently is a hub of tantric yoga. Something that Madonna probably studied along with her Kabbalah lessons. So, this type of yoga is meant to build and release energy in order to achieve enlightenment through the body, not in spite of it. Or something like that.
The night of the full moon party after partaking in my free trial day of yoga classes, the center sponsored a “spiral meditation” at the beach. This was a party in itself that they said was meant to build solar energy to counteract the lunar energy that makes the party animals on the island lose their mind. We arranged ourselves in a spiral holding hands with people of corresponding astrological signs. There was a bonfire and house music playing with the swami performing some weird incantations in the middle. I don’t know what shit was going on, but at the end of the night I lost my shoes somehow and am happy to be alive.
My Estonian friend got into a motorcycle accident that night on the way to the full moon party and he was bruised on his arm and legs although it could have been a lot worse. He has a good attitude though, and unbending faith so this incident will only increase his devotion.
I knew that it was time for me to leave the island the day after the full moon party despite all the colorful people I had met and the beautiful scenery. I had already milked my way into some incredible guest houses with gorgeous views because the original room they had promised me for a reasonable price wasn’t available when I arrived. Lucky for me because I paid a fraction of what the rooms were worth.
My last morning at Koh Phangan was spent drinking tea with my brother’s friends on the porch of the house that they rented. We spoke about our crazy adventures thus far and our persistent desire to see even more of Asia.