Thailand - Day 6 & 7 - Koh Lanta

Our island hideaway

We were both in easy agreement as to what our activities would be for our first full day on the island – after nearly three months of travelling all we wanted to do was lie on a beach! Unfortunately we got a bit too overzealous and despite being vigourous with our sun cream we realised after a couple of hours that we’d both got rather embarrassingly sunburnt, and after swearing blind we wouldn’t become typical brits abroad!

We swiftly retreated to hide our shame (and raw skin) in hammocks in the shadows for the rest of the afternoon. As luck would have it this was also a convenient spot to watch the party set-up, and it soon became clear they would be going all out. The hotel owners and their Rastafarian friends spent all afternoon crafting giant lanterns to put out on the beach and setting up a beach BBQ and bar…at this point we were still wondering where they were expecting guests to come from. We’d seen a total of about 10 people on the beach, most of whom were day-tripping from further north on scooters and we figured not many people would be keen to drive 25 minutes that night for a beach party in a pretty lazy part of the island.

Bringing in the muscle...

We continued to watch the party set-up get more and more elaborate into the early evening, at one point they even brought an elephant onto the beach from the elephant sanctuary across the road to help erect a giant log to hang the lanterns from! Needless to say that caused a bit of a stir with tourists and locals alike.

Come sundown we donned our finery to go and check out the party and it was DEAD. We actually felt a bit sorry for them as it was still only the Rasta’s and us in sight. We decided to keep the BBQ ladies busy and ordered some cheap and tasty food and a couple of drinks and enjoyed them out on the beach. Word had it a popular band from the Malaysian island of Langkawi would be playing come about 8pm so we thought we’d hang around to watch them.

Come 9.30pm there was no sign of the band and with the exception of two girls who had come for dinner and then left again there really wasn’t any indication that a party would be happening any time soon. To make matters worse, they were having massive audio issues and the music they were trying to play kept cutting out every 30 seconds or so meaning they’d had to turn it off altogether.

By this point, convinced the party was not meant to be and pretty exhausted from the heat (and our hideous sunburn) we decided to call it a night and retreated to our beach shack…oh how mistaken we were…

Sunset on Klong Jak

 It was about 30 or 40 minutes after we had both dozed off that the LOUDEST music you have ever heard started. I’m not just talking loud, it was beyond loud. It was walls-shaking-feel-it-through-the-floor-loud. The kind of loud that the speakers couldn’t really copy with so were really distorted, and to make it worse it wasn’t even the band – this was clearly just the warm up of really, really bad party tunes. We were both shattered so tried to sleep through it (as if that were possible), about 20 minutes later the band started and although they were loud they were playing reggae covers of pretty chilled out songs so for about another 10 minutes or so I think we dozed off again. Then it was time for intermission, and obviously rather than tamper with the dodgy audio in between sets they decided to leave it as is, this time banging out some pretty awful dance music at the same volume as before.

We stuck it out, seething with anger in our room for about another hour – hoping that each time the band stopped it would be for good but it was always just another intermission with unbearably loud music before they kicked off again. At this point we decided there was nothing else to it but to get up, get dressed and go and get a (hideously overpriced) beer on the beach to watch the rest of it.

Ready to party...

The party wasn’t kicking by any means but there were about six or seven backpacker kids who looked about 12 jumping around in the sand to the music, and a few older ones passed out on sun loungers. The group of Rasta’s had grown significantly and I suddenly became clear that maybe this party wasn’t so much for tourists as for the owners and their heavily dreadlocked friends.

We chose a couple of loungers at the back, in the dark, away from the action in an attempt to ride out the rest of the evening. Unfortunately we hit it just as the band broke for another intermission and as a Katy Perry track kicked in and nearly burst our eardrums I thought James was about to break…

Poor James, he’d suffered the sunburn worse than I had and had barely slept the night before…he was a shell of his former self, which became all the more apparent as he stood up, wild-eyed and shouted ‘I can’t take this anymore…’ at me before wandering towards the group of Rasta’s sat in darkness off to one side.

I sat there for a moment a bit gobsmacked as the whitest (well, reddest at this point), ginger-bearded boy in the world approached a group of about 20 full-on, dreadlocked-to-their ankles Rastafarians. I couldn’t see what was going on from where I was, but five minutes later he came back and told me we’d been invited to join them.

So there we were – James and I – sat right bang in the middle of guys smoking the biggest joints I have EVER seen in my life. (Fear not, fortunately they let James roll his own…) Meanwhile the white kids on the loungers were looking at us in utter confusion, wondering how on earth we’d managed to get an ‘in’ with the cool kids.

We sat there for about an hour and finally things started the wind down and the band finished their last set at about 3am. We said our goodnights to our new found friends and headed back to bed – the music continued, thankfully at a slightly lower volume, until about 4am when we both finally managed to get off to sleep.

After taking advantage of a lie-in the next morning (all the staff were out cold recovering from the night before) we decided to hire a scooter and see a bit more of the island, just in case we were missing out on some awesome beaches outside of out little cove.

We took a jaunt up the coast about 15 minutes and stopped for breakfast at Klong Nin beach. It was a nice enough beach but it was huge and sprawling (and seemingly full of middle-aged white men?!) so we went for a quick swim to cool off and then headed further north to the famous ‘Long Beach’…unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what the guidebooks make it out to be, you could barely see sand for bars and restaurants and it was filthy! After making a quick pharmacy stop for some aftersun we scooted back to our beach shack and gave ourselves a (gentle) pat on the back for unknowingly picking the best spot of the island (minus the 4am disco!).