Word: ko
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Back home she was a sorority sister, a pre-med student. She dated a guy named Dave who still sends her e-mail about his first year at law school. To Tamara, 23, now stretched out on a beach on Ko Pha-Ngan island, those missives read like what they are: archival records of what has become, for her, a lost civilization. Torts. Civil procedure. What is he talking about? Dave would hardly recognize her now, with her navel ring, Balinese warrior tattoos and baggy Thai fisherman's pants. Tamara, this retiring, freckled brunette with a narrow body and tiny...
There are at least 2,000 kids like Tamara here on Ko Pha-Ngan island, a 20-sq.-mi., palm-fringed, mountainous speck off the eastern coast of Thailand. The beaches are pristine--white sand, yellow boulders, coral reefs and gently slapping waves. You can rent a bungalow for $5 a day. The boys and girls seem to be young, thin and beautiful. They convene from all over the globe: club kids from London, bar hostesses from Tokyo, English teachers from Taipei, tech refugees from Silicon Valley--all looking to partake of this new civilization on the island that...
...time Alex Garland used it as the setting for his 1997 novel about young travelers in Thailand searching for the garden of Eden, Ko Pha-Ngan was already a legend on the Asian traveling circuit. Garland's The Beach has taken on a talismanic quality here: waterlogged paperbacks pass from bungalow to bungalow. It is the founding myth of this place: you come looking for paradise...
...than the one laboring in that cubicle in San Jose, Calif., or pouring drinks in that Surrey pub. "Elsewhere your time is spent playing a role--work, family, career. You don't push the boundaries spiritually and physically," says Backyard Dave, a deejay who became globally renowned through playing Ko Pha-Ngan rave parties. "Out here you can be who you really want...
...sense that she had broken through to discover what she calls "this new sense of freedom"--came on a Thursday (or was it a Friday?) in November when she first indulged in a hit of Ecstasy, a drug that is illegal in the U.S. but quite plentiful on Ko Pha-Ngan, and got lost in the orgiastic besotment of one of Ko Pha-Ngan's legendary Full Moon parties, where trance music blares for days and thousands of foreigners lose it on Hat Rin beach. While she was dancing with friends she had met on the boat trip over...