Hay-Nicholls Holidays

New Year's Edition

Special Guest Editor, Adam Hay Nicholls, gives his report on Thanksgiving, Full Moon Party, shifty Thai nightlife and what exactly luxury holidays should be made of - Parental Discretion Advised.

I was reunited with Chris and Steph in a guest house close to Bangkok’s Khao San Road – South East Asia’s epicenter for backpackers. It was my understanding that this was what Chris and Steph had been doing for four months – trudging around the globe with a single spare pair of undies and a couple of t-shirts between them. So when I opened the door to their room and found Chris’ flat rearranged inside, I was a bit taken aback.

These two have not packed light. And neither had I, because Chris insisted I bring a couple of bottles of booze, some books and some toiletries and assorted other crap from Paris. So having heaved a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and Chris’ rollerblading knee pads (don’t ask) across seven time zones, I was well and truly ready to have a large Chang with my mates and then watch women fire ping pong balls from you know where.

The next day we headed to Phuket. My mate Wan, who I was at school with aged 11, is in the hotel management game and his family owns Sri Panwa – which is pretty much the finest hotel in the world. I usually wind up here a couple of times a year. It’s my second home.

Sri Panwa is not really like a hotel. It’s made up of individual villas, each with their own infinity pool, and totally private. Our villa was a two-bedroom palace and within a couple of minutes Chris and I had worked out an ingenious way to reposition the TV so we could watch Bond movies in our pool.

We had set ourselves a mission: to make Thanksgiving dinner in Thailand. So the next day we were off to buy turkeys and, being the social butterflies that we are, had no trouble rounding up some hungry guests.

Sri Panwa is so amazing you never want to leave the place, so we really saw very little of Phuket except for one drunken night out in Patong where my mate Jimmy, who was down at Sri Panwa for his birthday, introduced us to Suzy Wong’s – an establishment that encourages you to spank strippers. The trouble is they hit back.

Chris summed up my approach to accommodation as follows: “Adam likes to stay in places that are either really expensive or really shit. He considers anything else to be boring”. So I was thrilled to spend the night in Surrat Thani, the biggest shit hole in Thailand, full of scumbags. We left Phuket and headed for the islands of the east coast, but got marooned in ST because of the most unhelpful travel agency in the world. We stayed in a cheap hostel which wasn’t too grotty, ate some hawker food, and prepared to get the first boat out of there in the morning.

Our destination was Koh Pha Ngan, where we would go to the full moon party. However, we’d heard that a lot of farangs (that’s Thai for Johnny Foreigners) get their rooms broken into while they're partying. If my laptop went missing, I’d be up shit creek. So we decided to pop by Koh Samui to see my buddy Vincent and leave our gear at his. Vincent looks after F1 driver Nico Rosberg’s motorhome, but lives on Koh Samui during the off-season. He has a house with ornate oriental wooden doors and lots of dragon statues. We were impressed!

On Koh Pha Ngan we stayed in wooden huts off Salad beach, one of the quieter and prettier beaches on the north west of the island. I did some scuba diving, and the sea was so rough that I covered my dive buddy in vomit. We also went to a very random beach bar that was run by Switzerland’s answer to Iggy Pop.

And then there was the Full Moon Party. We made chums with some girls at the place we were staying and got shizzed up on 45 baht beers and popcorn. On the beach we found a sort of adventure playground with a scramble net and slide, and we jumped up and down to 90s grunge and cheese.

Our next stop was Koh Tao, where all three of us went scuba diving. We got a terrific deal with accommodation that was only £2 a night. We also found a shop that sold homemade condoms, but we decided not to risk it.

Then it was back to Phuket, aboard the night ferry: two floors, with low ceilings, and about 50 backpackers sprawled across the floors. I went outside to watch as we speared across the Gulf of Thailand, shooting stars in the sky and fishing boats glittering in the distance. It was quite magical.

This time our Sri Panwa villa was even cooler, with a panoramic view across the sea and islands, and a bedroom actually in the middle of the infinity pool. Chris and I discovered it was possible to jump from my bed into the pool, which we recorded for you on YouTube.

We also discovered that pub quizzes in Thailand are harder than pub quizzes in Paris. The 'Burning Sensations' came sixth out of six.

So that was our three weeks in Thailand. We slept in seven different beds, drank 100 beers between us, ate a lot of curry, made dozens of friends, did six scuba dives, and spanked half a dozen strippers, before saying our teary good-byes.