Backpacking Inc.
Ko Pha Ngan, Ban Tai & Hat Rin Nok, Thailand
March 2002
If youth is wasted on the young, so too is Ko Pha Ngan. Just ask the ashen-faced lad of indeterminate nationality coming down badly on the bench opposite us in the back of the songthaew. Unable to express his destination in word form, he’d grabbed the map of the island out of the driver’s hands and feverishly stabbed a long-nailed finger at a point about three kilometers off the western coast, before slipping into a state of light catatonia, jaw slack and bottle of Serenity Brand Drinking Water spilling out of his hands to form a wet patch in the crotch of his black stovepipe jeans.
He was long and thin, with a goatee beard and long black hair thickly streaked with white. His skin had the translucent whiteness of uncooked squid, a remarkable achievement in a place ringed by the most beautiful sunbathing beaches in the world. A squiddish white chest sweated under his unbuttoned black shirt, which was made of a filmy, elfish material and whose flared sleeves flopped a long way past his wrists. Two pinpoint pupils would occasionally fix on us unseeingly, before rolling theatrically into the back of his head. We braced ourselves for the inevitable projectile vomit.
The road to Ban Tai is punctuated by some ridiculously steep hills, and as our spluttering songthaew ascended and swooped through groves of coconut palms and mango trees, our friend slumped from the padded bench to a sitting position on the floor, then reclined on one elbow before finally lying face down on the steel floor. By the time the road had flattened out and started to run along the beach at Hat Ban Khai, his leather boots were hanging precariously out the open back end of the truck. A long frail arm lay draped around one of the seats’ supporting struts, and represented his only insurance against a slow, sliding exit out of our lives. At one point, an English tourist, shirtless and carrying a Heineken, hopped onto the back of the truck and exclaimed to the boy; “Hello mate, I recognize you! You were going off!”
Ko Pha Ngan is a beautiful little drop in the southwestern corner of the Gulf of Thailand. Less than 200 square kilometers in size, the majority of its soft white beaches and fishing hamlets live in harmonic disconnection to the 21st century. Wooden ploughs drawn by buffalo till fields, and the locals sit by the side of the road in gossipy circles and split coconuts by hand. The serenity of the inland waterfalls drew holidaying Thai kings for generations. But these days the visitors are backpackers, and the draw card is the famous Full Moon Party of Hat Rin Nok.
The Party was conceived to celebrate the enormous soft-gold orb that rises once a month out of the Gulf to the east of Hat Rin Nok. But what began as a small gathering of friends and insiders has quickly grown into a massive “must-do” event on the young traveller’s calendar, and nowadays up to 8,000 people flock to the island at a time. The number of bars and bungalows has accordingly mushroomed; top-notch DJs jet in from Europe and Asia, and a thriving marketplace can provide you with illicit substances that you never knew existed.
We arrived in Hat Rin Nok the day after the Party and after checking into our bungalow, we headed for the famous beach. It was a hot afternoon, the kind of heat that locals sensibly avoid and English girls use to metamorphosize into bikinied lobsters. Stepping out from between towering palms, we discovered that the beach had that white-sanded, emerald-watered virginity that makers of cigarette commercials yearn for, and that the children for whom the world is kept in trust were busily trying to deflower it.
Plastic water bottles bobbed in the pale green sea through the fleet of wooden fishing boats and out to the horizon. The sand, fine and powdery, was studded with joint ends and beer bottle tops. Used condoms and tampons were stuffed between the rocks at the northern end of the beach, below the MM bar, where a mushroom shake will keep you hallucinating all night for just 300 baht.
Some of our peers had managed to go home and change into their swimming costumes, but many were still in their day-glo-splattered gear from the night before. PVC and platforms lay with boob tubes and black leather. Ringed nipples cooked to the colour of raw meat in the sun. Some slept, some swam; others kept the night alive, dancing on the sand before a sentinel wall of speakers three metres high, that stretched along much of the beach. Some of the speakers played drum ‘n Bass, others played trance, still more played Britney and the sounds all crashed and mashed and ran in and out of each other until they’d been rendered unintelligible to the unwired ear.
As we looked for a place to sit, we passed a man, a New Yorker in his middle 20s. He had, perched and shivering on his shoulder, a wide-eyed, possummy animal the size of a mouse. My wife, who has worked with wildlife for years, recognized it as a baby Loris that was not only nocturnal but too young to be off its mother’s teat.
“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t know what it was. I just bought it yesterday. Would you like to hold him?”
No, she wouldn’t. What she would like him to do was return it to a park ranger’s office, for without its maternal milk, and in this daylight, it would soon be dead.
“I’ll do that,” he said. Later that evening, we saw him in two different bars, showing the Loris to groups of young female backpackers.
The dirt-orange streets behind the beach are a Lonely Planet ghetto, filled with the things we don’t leave home without, like tattoo parlours, pool tables, internet cafes and shiatsu massage. New age hippy shops sell crystals and centrifugal paintings. Pharmacies hang signs confessing that they are out of diet pills but do have Morning After pills (after what is not made explicit). Penniless Israelis spread mats selling beaded necklaces and ganja pipes. Hair braiders walk up and down the streets, hawking their trade of making white women look ridiculous. Toe rings and piercings are popular, and you can buy a Bob Marley sarong just about anywhere.
We tried to find somewhere for dinner that didn’t have a WideScreen TV and Dolby Surround. The alleys were strewn with dozens of restaurants showing continuous and badly pirated DVD movies. The films are new Hollywood blockbusters, and with a bit of planning, you could assure yourself of non-stop, badly dubbed, out-of-focus Gwynneth from noonday till midnight. After half an hour of searching fruitlessly for a Paltrow-free zone, we plumped for a place showing Discovery Channel on the dubious grounds that at least we might learn something. We ordered the house special: all-day English Breakfast. As the sausages arrived, the owner promptly changed channels and put on a DVD of Bounce, starring Ben Affleck and, well, you-know-who.
About six months before visiting Thailand, the World Economic Forum came to my hometown of Melbourne, Australia. Thousands of protesters, mostly young people, had ringed the casino in which the Forum was being held, chanting, singing and preventing many of the delegates from attending. That day, for the first time, I felt that my generation had found its cause, its purpose, its mission. Our parents may have had Vietnam, but we had globalisation, and the enemies were the übercorporations, the omnipotent beings that made sneakers and coffee and hamburger meals of negative nutritional value. That day I felt the deep passions this issue aroused, and despite the best efforts of charging, baton-wielding police, I saw the anti-globalisation message clearly sent, just as it had been sent from places like Seattle, Gothenburg and Genoa.
But what is Ko Pha Ngan, if it isn’t the embodiment of the globalisation we all profess to despise? Twenty years ago, before the Party, Hat Rin Nok was a tiny fishing village, unchanged for millennia. A generation later, our generation, and the streets are paved with internet cafes, and the fishing boats take us on all-you-can-smoke ganja cruises.
Like some tie-dyed KFC, Backpacking Inc. has become a franchise too, a pre-fabricated worldwide formula that is constructed wherever two or more Germans are gathered together. It exploits the disparity in Third World wages just as surely as Nike does; where else can you get a beachfront bungalow for six bucks a day?
Cultural imperialism? Don’t blame McDonalds or Bill Gates. They didn’t bring the satellite dishes and Premier League soccer. They didn’t demand the right to have Celtic rings tattooed around their biceps. Nor did they put sausages and eggs on every breakfast menu.
Equitable distribution of wealth? Not here. Most of the bars, restaurants and bungalow outfits are owned or leased by farangs, foreigners who came for a holiday and never left. The only locals who get jobs are those who speak English.
Environmental vandalism? You betcha. And no evil, oil-spilling faceless corporations here; just a bunch of rich and spoilt people who can’t be bothered cleaning up their own shit.
And what of the Full Moon Party itself? There is nothing the slightest bit indigenous about it. Pha Ngan’s locals are originally from the Chinese island of Hainan, but the hip-hop, trip-hop, garage, and reggae are from the clubs we have back home. As are most of the DJs. The bars have names like Drop In, Tommy’s and the Vinyl Club. 3-4 Methylenedioxymethylamphetamine does not occur naturally on the island, and so all the ecstasy needs to be shipped in.
And as the full moon rises in the east, our generation will dance on the fine white sand of Hat Rin Nok, facing the decks with our backs to the very thing we are supposed to be celebrating. The only time most of us will actually notice the moon at all is when we are standing shin-deep and urinating in its direction in the pristine, diamond-clear waters of the bay.
There are not, as yet, any five-star resorts on Ko Pha Ngan; the lack of an airport makes it too hard for the fat cats to get to. The McDonald’s Drive-Thru hasn’t been built, the Starbucks’ Caramel Frappuccino yet to become available. The World Bank isn’t even trying to build a dam there. The buck of responsibility can’t be passed onto the IMF or Heartless Multinationals. It’s not their mess to clean up. They haven’t been there; we have.
I don’t know what happened to our Party-going songthaew friend. We got out at Ban Kai, a quiet beach about 15 minutes from the ferry station. As we trudged away in the direction of our bungalows, we saw the driver trying to rouse our comatose companion, trying to ascertain where he wanted to go and, probably, if he had any money. Like cab drivers anywhere else in the world.
