Nine Years of Progress...

When it rains in this country, my word does it rain! The initial deluge lasted 3 days without break and turned roads into rivers, it continued to rain, on and off, for the rest of the week and made our time here a bit of a washout.

We had made our way from the port, across the island to a town called Chewang. I stayed here in 1997 with Mr. Lynch and Mr. O'Sullivan when this sleepy little town was paradise personified. Well, 9 years of "progress" have wrecked that! What was once a handful of small shops and a couple of bars is now a sprawling 6km stretch of tat shops, brothels, DVD sellers, nightclubs, English Pubs, McDonalds, Starbucks, Tescos etc, etc.

The music booms out until 6am, pick-up trucks cruise the streets advertising nightclubs, blasting out there own music and tannoy announcements so loudly that the noise pollution can be unbearable. Sunburnt western kids roar up and down the streets on motorbikes far too powerful for them, whilest others limp along heavily bandaged down one side. Old grey haired western men proudly strut along, arm in arm with skinny young Thai girls. I can honestly say that the Thai trademark smiling and friendly face is nowhere to be seen.

The first place we stayed was a hellhole above a nightclub, but we were desperate and it had a picture of the fab four on the wall, which at least cheered Kerri up a little. The next morning, after very little sleep and a skinful of beer, we hired a bike and zipped round the coast road in search of somewhere new.We settled on Bo Phut, a small town with a few 5* resorts scattered along the beach and a community of ex-pats, none of whom seemed overly thrilled about living there!

Due to the rain, our main activity involved sitting on our balcony for "book club". However, during one rare sunny spell we did wander down the beach and, like a couple of pikeys, crashed the pool at a luxury resort under the pretence that we were staying there.

The only other noteworthy event was when we took a speed boat to the world famous Full Moon Party. Once upon a time this party was the preserve of 5,000-6,000 hippies and backpackers, smashed on whisky, mushrooms and Thai weed, raving until dawn wearing nothing more than flurescant body paint.

The party is still good, but it's a bit different now. 20,000 people now cram onto the beach – the majority of whom I would describe as "holiday-makers". I say this because some of the girls there looked as though they dressed for as night at Discotheque Royals, not for a night sitting on a dirty beach and pissing in the sea. A strong police presence means that the strongest brew available is a combination of the good old Sang Som (as previously documented) with what the Thais call Red Bull, but is probably more like liquid caffine. Still, this is plenty strong enough, and there were more than a few unconcious casualties littering the streets when we got there at midnight, and by 5am it had certainly done the job for us!

Anyway while we were there we also discovered that Koh Samui is very expensive compared to Koh Pha Ngan, so once we had recovered, we upped sticks and moved.