Full Moon Saves the Day

The Phi Phi Islands are an amazing little cluster of islands in the Andaman Sea. They’re about 40km from Phuket and the only way to get to them is by boat. The boat takes 2-3 hours but it’s s worth it when you get there. You can do a day tour from Phuket or Krabi, but doing it that way, you don’t really experience what the islands are all about.

I first went to Phi Phi in July 2004 and my friends and I agreed there and then as we stood in wonder of Maya Bay Ko Phi Phi Don that we would go back there and be on that very beach on Christmas Day that year. And that was our plan: Christmas and New Year 2004/05 partying on the islands.

When we got to Bangkok, our plan was to get tickets to goto the Phi Phi Islands for Christmas and then head over to Ko Pan Ngan for New Year to celebrate the coming of 2005. But there was a problem with our schedule.

Full moon that year actually fell on 26th December. Anybody who knows anything about full moons and Thailand will know the Full Moon Party in Ko Pan Ngan is a must. Or at least it was a must back then. Now they’re too commercial and full of muppets (god I sound like my dad).

What could we do? We wanted to be in Ko Phi Phi for Christmas. That was the plan from July. But the Full Moon Party is the dog’s testiculars! Only one thing for it: New Year in Phi Phi and Christmas and full moon in Pan Ngan. So we booked a 3-way loop flight Bangkok-Samui-Phuket-Bangkok. Perfect.

Christmas was great but we were waiting for the big one on the 26th and when the day came we just chilled by the pool waiting for nightfall. Little did we know that morning about 250km away, over on Ko Phi Phi the whole area was being devastated by the tsunami.

I had never heard of a tsunami before. I saw it on the news and thought it looked pretty bad. Although nobody really caught full video footage of it because it struck early in the morning and who would stand there with a video camera when a huge wave was swallowing everything up.

This was pre-social media days, so I thought it best check my mobile to see if my parents had heard what happened. They had and had been going frantic for hours thinking we were in Phi Phi for Christmas. I explained everything, and how we were the other side in the Gulf of Thailand because of the full moon. Lucky!

Needless to say, my family and friends were relieved, we were relieved, and so were the 10,000 revellers at the Ful Moon Party that night. It was a somber atmosphere at first, but it went down as a great night for most people there, but that’s for another time.

We didn’t make it to Phi Phi as the islands were absolutely devastated. There isn’t much above seal level on the Phi Phi islands, and many people were killed in the beach huts, and all business and peole’s livelihoods were wiped away in minutes. Many scuba diving schools were out in the Andaman diving when it happened and have never been seen since. Thousands died, but we were lucky because that day just happened to clash with the full moon.

That was in 2004, and I didn’t go back there until 2015, and they have completely rebuilt the village and its full of bars, restaurants, tattoo shops and of course it still has its amazing beaches.

To look at them from the viewpoint up on the hill, or just to walk out on Maya Bay, it’s impossible to comprehend what happened that morning. There are tsunami meeting points now and everybody seems ready for the next time. It will probably never happen in the same place again, but if it does, it will never defeat the spirit of Thailand.