I first started coming to the Island when the Island was cool or was this when I was cool, not sure; surely there was a time when we both aligned. When the full moon was young, I danced on the beach to techno and trance, drank out of buckets, and slept under nets. But not much has changed. Utopia usually only has two dimensions, or maybe three if you indulge the mushroom shake.
I have now been to the island five times, and I am not sure why I still come, it is always at the beginning of something, never at the end. Ko Phan Ghan is a capitol of 90s Libertarianism, the curse of my generation. Libertarians know how to put on a good party but never how to clean up after it. The collapse of the Berlin Wall persuaded many in the European labouring classes that freedom is a new sort of hedonism as opposed to an old form of Marxism. Or perhaps it is just an old form of youthful rebellion, and that is eternal.
I sat in a restaurant yesterday next to a young man with a Celtic tattoo who was complaining that the food was spicy. It made me feel glad that I didn’t have the money to get a Celtic tattoo way back at the beginning of the lunar cycle. It’s all part of the spice of life I suppose, the faded symbols of rebellion, often against the man that has long left the straw bungalow.
I am not sure if I will come back to the island again, and I have possibly said this many times before. It is spectacularly beautiful and sophisticated in its tessellated Thai tourism sort of way, but it is an island and islands are full-stops, not sentences. People come to islands to escape from things, and you only need to escape if you are first in prison.
Kolkata is next…
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