The resort we chose ended up being the best we've stayed in yet. Idyllic wooden bungalows tucked away in a bamboo forrest along the shoreline, amazing. The staff was sweet, the restaurant radical, a perfect pool, and just like a great Vegas casino, you felt not the slightest need to leave. Needless to say, we spent the majority of our time here, with a good number of laps to the local corner store, and ended up staying two extra nights.
As relaxed as we were, we made sure to make it to at least one of Koh Phangan's famous parties, and because we weren't able to make the full moon party, the half moon party is what we found. Picture an awesome open-air night club tucked away deep in the jungle, bass bumping, fire dancers rocking, and a
night market with all the drunk munchie food you could imagine. As soon as we got there, we had no choice but to crush a bucket of Red Bull vodka, and between the seven of us and seven straws, we basically played circle of death until the bucket was devoid of all contents. With a solid caffeinated buzz, we marched straight up to the gates, paid our 500 baht / person, and strode directly into the belly of the beast.
Surrounded by black lights, and looking down at our plain white skin, we knew something had to be done and we stopped at the first body paint stand we found. We entered Brett, Matt and Brooke, and emerged Superman, Batman and Chick with Sweet Arm Decor. We were ready to dance our little booties off, and we did. We all ended up having a great time, making it home unscathed, and arrived at our place only to find a certain Benjamin Shapero yelling his ass off in the pool with a wine glass full of Malibu rum (which the Thai bar tender apparently thought was white wine, score one for Shappy). We had a sweet end of the night pool party and called it a night.
The next day, we decided to once again try our hand at navigating the island on the left side of the road, this time handing over the reigns to Mr. Matt BT. Matt, B Shap and myself took off in Uku 2.0 (a new model Suzuki Side Kick) in search of waterfalls, view points and awesome beaches. We found ourselves hiking up sheer rock cliffs (where a waterfall used to be), finding nothing but a trickle, but did manage to hike up to an amazing view of Koh Phangan and ended up finding some great deserted beaches. There is no better way to explore an island than by car or motorcycle. On a small island like KP, you find yourself in places you wouldn't normally go, see things that most tourists miss, and on top of it all, you end up driving around the entire island in a matter of hours. Because Uku 2.0 lacked a good back seat but had a small truck bed, we ended up riding around in the bed to save space. Being able to ride in the humid open air, looking out on tropical jungles scattered with little dingy third world huts, really made me realize where I was and how lucky I am to be doing what I'm doing. Riding in the back of a truck around a remote tropical island off the coast of Thailand….. insanity.
The Dare: Our first dare came from none other than our good friend and fellow world traveler, McLure Foote. The dare was to convince a Thai lady boy to get on my shoulders, take a picture of it, and post it as my profile picture for a week. To say I wasn't nervous about this would be an absolute lie, I had no idea how I was going to get a lady boy on my shoulders, let alone be able to single out one out of the thousands. Luckily I had some help from our friend Olivia who we've been staying with in Bangkok. She took me strait to lady boy central, which basically looked like a three story outdoor shopping mall, but every store front was a lady boy brothel, talk about heaven. We sat down at one of the bars where I proceeded to calm my nerves with a beer and a shot of Thailand's finest well whiskey. We got to talking with the bar tender, explained our intentions, and was soon introduced to one of the local "Mamasan's". The Mamasan took us over to one of her lady boys, and obviously was not very clear on exactly what was going on because as soon as I squatted down, both of them had a look of "WTF is this kid doing?" I spoke not one word to my partner in crime, and motioned for her to put a leg over my shoulder. As soon as one leg was over, I quickly snatched up the other and busted out the best 150 lb squat of my life. Letting out a surprised high pitched "woooohh", she was up on my shoulders and the deed was done. I let her down, slipped her 100 Baht and walked away giggling like a lady boy who just got put up on a young American boy's shoulders.
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