It's a Dog's Life

Bore da! For those of you who's getting the results today - good luck! (Although by the time anyone reads this you'll already have them!)

I've been in Ko Phangan for 4 days now and I'm enjoying the easy life. The Full Moon party was a bit of a let down really. It was OK, but nothing to live up to it's legendary status. In fact everyone I meet here agree that the night before was ten times better.

Since the party the English have gone (quite a good thing, one or two of them were worse with my name than the boys in Bangkok. One of them settled on "Sanjay" for some reason!). The morning after the party i woke up in one of the bar's hamocks and got very confused. I wasn't rerady to open my eyes yet, but all around me I was convinced that I could hear the strongest Merthyr accents! Turns out that a bunch of Hwntws were travelling round Asia and kept coming to Ko Phangan on every full moon!

I left that place by midafternoon and moved up the beach to what is pretty much a Dutch colony. The Dutch guy from the bus down is in the cabin next to me, there's two more on the other side, and there's 5 more just round the corner! Basically it's 8 Dutch, me and an Austrian! And bloody hell do the Dutch live up to their stereotype, they seem to always have a joint in their hand, even when they wake up! I've noticed since I got here actually that EVERYONE is smoking something or another. From the 30 or so people I've gotten to know on the island I remain the only one who doesn't smoke, bit bizzare really!

A lot of people are leaving today going to another island, Koh Tao. I wasn't planning on leaving, but my sister's been recommending it so I might change my mind at the last minute! I'm loving it here but every day is pretty much the same. Dates and time doesn't factor here. You sleep when you want to sleep, eat when you want to eat and drink when you want to drink. Between those three things you do very little - play cards, read and, if you'r feeling very adventerous, maybe a game of volleyball!

The island is covered with dogs. They roam in packs of about 5 and all have their own beach. It's pretty bizzare to see a labrador, alsation and tiny terrier patrolling our beach 24 hours a day! The locals arn't too keen on them, in fact they used to have annual culls until a few years ago. Every year they went out with poison darts and bamboo peashooters and killed as much dogs as they could. It seems awful to us, but compared to Vietnam it's nothing. In Vietnam dogs are just another delicacy, along with snake, pidgeons, lizards, seahorses and scorpions! When a litter is born they put the dogs on a table, the ones who fall off are the stupid dogs and will be tomorrow's lunch, the ones that stay on get to become pets!

It's a dog's life alright!