Full Moon Party - documentary about travellers to Thailand & Ko Phangan parties

"Bangkok 1996 alone at two in the morning bought back that same feeling I had on the first day at school. My mother released my hand and she walked back toward the gate from where we had arrived together at the huge strange building. The night seems to be oily about me with humidity, the airport is a reasonably calm environment with a yellow electric hum reflecting off huge windows all around you. There are uniforms framing many faces, some questions, a stamp, and nobody bothers to check baggage on the way in. Then the final set of doors open and you are standing on the other side, in the black spicy hot box of Asian night and a thousand taxi drivers are yelling at you, someone wants to carry your bag, and you know there is a bus station around here somewhere. But then you learn that the busses stop at midnight, and with safety being in numbers and with my American friend emerging from the crowd, we begin negotiations with a cheerful beetle stained mouth. The taxi takes us to Thanon Koa San, or Khao San Road, the tourist ghetto of Bangkok where all budget backpackers and twisted travellers gather. Fresh off the plane and with suburban stories of kidnap, theft and corruption running in my mind, I insisted upon taking my rucksack inside the taxi, making the journey a cramped one. My face pressed against the dirty glass I watched the scenes of black smoking buses, families on scooters, pedestrians in single file and single light bulb-lit eating places flash by. Pitch black canals crossed by crazy drivers and the gilded flat portraits of the asthmatic looking king everywhere, flashing bursts of radio fly by as our driver takes every opportunity to keep moving in the solid traffic, occasionally mounting the median strip or sidewalk." - from an almost finished novel about the global rave freak scene in the 90s. Another short section published here.