Full Moon party, Ko Phng Ngan, Thailand

The Bucket People
Full Moon Party on Ko Phangan

Part 3

Back on the beach, the binge-drinkers don’t dance, they merely wobble. The motor functions go first. Then aggression sets in, no time for that hippy love stuff. Nasty twisted hate faces on pale drunken gargoyles populate the beach by midnight.

Two or three hours into this drunk-fest and Hat Rin Beach is littered with casualties.
The Swedish girl and her friends are back, still twirling, but her eyes have receded deeply into her strained face. In the crowd she recognizes me a second time and tries to smile. But it’s too late for subtleties, she merely leans forward and pukes her tiny drunken brain into the sand.

Next to her a young English man is clearly having a whale of a time, wobbling on all fours on the ground, losing his shoes and about to lose his wallet, but clinging to his Bucket. He’s crying. A whole flock of platinum blonde Britney Spears clones from Essex cross the beach and almost step on his head. The leader, a heavily made-up overweight youth in a bikini top and mini skirt, her almost exposed breasts flopping like airbags just before the crash, is rousing the troops, “Let’s get more Buckets, guys, we can’t go anywhere without new Buckets.”

A group of French tough guys from some no-hope suburb, wearing only Thai boxing shorts and expensive trainers, ‘Paris’ scrawled on their arms in luminous paint, stand in front of a massage parlor and toast each other noisily with their Buckets, while eyeing a group of massage girls who try to lure them onto their business premises to blow them off for 20 $. Before long, the guys will succumb and abandon the idea of pulling one of the 3000 free shags that are waiting in the sand.
No wonder perhaps, as rows of girls (and boys) line the shoreline by now. They are not looking for lovers or at the full moon over the placid bay, nor at the glittering phosphorescence in the water, which adds silent magic to the world. They are staring straight down at the waterline, retching and heaving puke into the surf. Some give up and piss themselves standing up in the shallow water, while others swim around in spastic circles, like maimed fish.

Everyone is suffering. Everyone is pretending that this is not so.

Along the bay, bars have set up sound systems that play House, Trance, Eminem remixes and a lot of awful Euro Techno. And that’s it. That’s all you get.
This is the global event.
In contrast to festivals in Europe and the US, the Full Moon Party is devoid of visual or intellectual thrills or gimmicks – no inflatables operated by eccentrics, no stilt walkers or jugglers, no esoteric movies flashing across giant screens, no book stalls offering cartoons, fringe lit or Greenpeace propaganda. Youth culture is no longer exclusive, it’s egalitarian. Any young consumer with an air ticket and a Bucket can join. America might be fighting another brutal war in some far flung place, but you’d never notice that here.
It doesn’t matter - most revelers are not here to communicates few are able to juggle even their Bucket from one hand to the other. There is no fringe lunacy, no marginal happening, no freak out – only human wallpaper racing for oblivion with sand stuck in its bum-crack.
Every month, on Hat Rin Beach, a little more of the world dies.

It’s well past midnight and the beach is covered in Bucket People. Many sit alone, staring into the night. They puke and piss in the surf. Others run around and scream, as if in some existential pain.
That’s because the Buckets don’t really make you happy. The first one makes you sweat under the tropical moon, so you buy another one quickly – half way through the second number, the first one kicks in and your ability to reason diminishes drastically and soon levels out at zero. Now you are half-dangerous and completely retarded.

It’s easy to tell the Bucket People from the rest. Some, perhaps a thousand revelers at the south eastern corner of the beach, have beaten their fear of being busted and are pilled up or tripping on mushrooms and acid. Wow, man. One daredevil freak is smoking a joint. But he’s the only one and he looks shifty while he’s at it.

On full moon night in Ko Phangan, the urge to have fun, to trip out, or even to fall in love, has been replaced by the Bucket. As long as you have money for another one, there is no need to worry about anything at all. You won’t last till dawn, but the future is bright. You might not notice it until you wake up the next morning - money and shoes gone, covered in urine and vomit, and glad they did not take your kidney as well - the world is all messed up and it is yours. If reality does not penetrate that far, there’s always the Burger King up the road to remind you of home.

Read Part 1 of The Bucket People

Read Part 2 of The Bucket People

Photographs by Aroon Thaewchatturat (www.onasia.com) If you would like to read more about festivals in Thailand, check the following stories:

The Illustrated Kill Convention - The Phuket Vegetarian Festival,

The Chonburi Buffalo Race

Phi Ta Khon - Thailand's Halloween

Fat chance for the (Heineken) Fat Fest