In my heyday, I was at the fabled Koh Phangan's full moon parties - three times - where I practised English, Swedish, Spanish, German and Hebrew, then walked the moonlit, vomit-strewn beach, enjoyed (meaning eating) local mushrooms, lit a bonfire of international camaraderie and watched the psychochemical clouds drift like memories into the dark Gulf of Thailand.
Dear, sweet youth. When it was easy to confuse a smile with love and a lot of things with happiness.
Stephen Ashton might have felt the same amid the New Year's revelry on Koh Phangan. The young Briton was dancing on the beach when he was hit by a stray bullet from a violent fight among Thai men who were reportedly chasing after the same women. Mr Ashton was pronounced dead at Ban Don hospital. It was tragic news to his family and friends - and dealt a blow to Thai tourism that has benefited so much from this gap-year paradise island and darling destination to The Beach and post-The Hangover generations of party-goers.
Nothing stinks like paradise, you could say, and it's always too late before we realise we're dancing on a graveyard. In Phuket on Jan 1, a 21-year-old Australian tourist with a history of mental illness plunged to death from the 9th floor of a Patong hotel. On Jan 2 in Pattaya, armed robbers cleaned up a group of Russian tourists as they were celebrating on a street. Luckily no shot was fired.
And then, the memory of the Krabi scandal that flared up in November still drips with blood: a Dutch woman was beaten and raped in Ao Nang, and the subsequent police inaction drove her father to make an anger-filled YouTube video titled "The Evil Man of Krabi". All of this was more real and much worse than the glorious squalor of the Third World shown in The Hangover, Part II.
But the stench of blood, I believe, can never overcome the persistent power of illusion. Tourism is a march of stupidity, wrote Don DeLillo, but more than that, it's a global ferris wheel motored by dream imagery and pure fantasy.
We have to believe there's a paradise somewhere (likely near the equator), otherwise how could we go on with our drudgery? The Tourism Authority of Thailand does its job efficiently by keeping the precious bubble of fantasy afloat; in truth, all tourism boards are naturally great peddlers of daydreams. Visitors will continue to buy the image of aquarium-clear beaches and full-moon-party over-indulgence while blocking out backstreet violence and dormant evil. Likewise, the romantic sight of the Eiffel Tower easily overrides stories of pickpockets in the Paris metro, and riding the London Eye is a much more pleasant experience than walking around Camden late on Saturday night. The smell of anonymous pee not so far from the Taj Mahal will never interfere with the majesty of the monument.
The problem with Thailand, perhaps, is that we're more eager to play along with that fantasy, either at the pristine seaside or the lurid neon-swamp of Soi Cowboy - so when reality shatters the bubble, as it sadly does, it's more shocking and severe. Stuck in our own myth of the "Land of Smiles" and lulled into a mindset of, in line with Kasian Techapira's word, "auto-colony" - I'll add "auto-Orientalist" - we've built an exaggerated image of ourselves as a host as generous as the Andaman and as untroubled as the Pacific, vast, cheap, equatorial, paradiasical and ready for every whim of billionaires and backpackers (in exchange for dollars of course). I'm sure the horrid (OK, funny-horrid) image of Bangkok in The Hangover, Part II actually improves our inbound-tourist traffic, for it shows that we encourage visitors to feel allowed, or as a dear British friend says "entitled", to behave excessively here.
When things go wrong, well then, basically we only have ourselves to blame.
The crimes that happened to Stephen Ashton in Koh Phangan and the Dutch woman in Krabi - horrible and inexcusable - are not just a clash between reality and fantasy: it's also a clash between two realities, one merry and relatively more well-off, the other struggling and insecure.
It's the job of the police (another big headache) to uphold the sanctity of justice while we still have some left. It's the job of the tourism board to keep the fantasy alive, which is necessary for the economy and in bridging the gap between those two worlds.
Then it's the job of us to believe less in fantasy and more in the unpredictability of things. A cynical tourist is a rare breed, but sometimes we all need to be, especially here, and even in the hallucinatory smoke that envelopes Koh Phangan.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.