#Wasted youth full#
I don't understand why they go."Īttempting to understand why they go, however, why this is the modern gap-year experience, is exactly what brings me to the Full Moon Party, surrounded by scores of topless teenagers urinating into the ocean to the words of the Black Eyed Peas' "I gotta feeling/That tonight's gonna be a good night/That tonight's gonna be a good, good night." What exactly is the lure of this beach to teenagers who are, after all, meant to be Britain's brightest? I'm here to find out. They don't want to understand the culture – they just want to binge. These days "gappers" touring Koh Phangan and its surrounding islands are, says Hoefer, "not experiencing anything apart from tourism. Hans Hoefer is the founder of Insight travel books, and the man who co-ordinated one of the first guides to Thailand back in the 70s, when fewer tourists visited the entire country (150,000) than now visit Burma annually. Sun, sand and sangria, as I call it." Indeed, the trend might even be away from the year of constructive good deeds that Curnock Cook might be thinking of – a trend towards increasingly mindless hedonism. More than 80% of them, says Richard Oliver, chairman of trustees at Year Out, "just go off and travel independently without any real purpose. Every year around 160,000 British school-leavers take a gap year before entering university. In fact, the vast majority of gappers do not use their year-out in anything approaching a fashion that might – in the eyes of universities – be viewed as "constructive". In a year when the number of university applications – a record 660,000 – has dwarfed the number of university places available – 450,000 – Curnock Cook may have a point.īut this is a point that has yet to trickle down, in practical terms, to the nation's school-leavers. Mary Curnock Cook argued that while in the past "a gap year has been when young people take a nice break and go out and see the world", the period should now "be used in a focused way to support an application to the course or university you are targeting". Three weeks ago, the chief executive of the universities and colleges admissions service (UCAS) declared to a Sunday newspaper that "the golden age of the gap year is over". This party scene, right here on this beach, is arguably the epitome, the pinnacle, of the modern gap-year experience. Today, frequented every month by between 10,000 and 30,000 European youngsters, the all-night party is the ultimate destination on south-east Asia's "banana pancake" trail a mecca for footloose gap-year tourists. Twenty-five years ago, this was a little-known hippy hang-out on the remote Thai island of Koh Phangan. Welcome to the Full Moon Party, the largest beach rave in the world. "No Bucket No Boom Boom", "Fuck My Buckets", "Everybody Fuck My Strong Buckets" – that kind of thing. The stalls are daubed with deeply dubious slogans, ranging from the lurid to the the moronic. And squeezed between the bars and the crowds are 35 wooden stalls, each selling plastic buckets filled with a litre's worth of vodka and Red Bull. Behind them, under the light of the full moon, thousands more shirtless, shoeless Europeans are massed outside 14 beachside bars, their knees bending awkwardly to a soundtrack of the Black Eyed Peas, Justin Bieber and generic drum'n'bass. U p and down the beach, young western men are unzipping their shorts and peeing into the Gulf of Thailand.
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