OUR third day in Thailand began with us going to get some breakfast/lunch in Karon whilst we decided what we were going to get up to throughout the rest of the day.
Stopping at a restaurant about five minutes down the road we decided to head towards one of the beaches which we hadn’t visited, Kamala.
After riding about ten minutes down the wrong road realising that we were heading back towards the cascade we visited yesterday, we hooked a u-turn and headed back the way we thought it was going to be!
Riding up and down, left and right and seemingly round and round we seemed to be chasing an invisible beach! If there’s one complaint I have against Thailand it’s that they don’t exactly signpost things efficiently! Signs will all of a sudden disappear and then five minutes later you’ll see one on the other side of the road to let you know that you’ve gone completely the wrong way!
Thanks. For. That.
In the end we decided to head for Kamala beach as that was one of the ones we hadn’t ‘hit’ on our last couple of days in the country. Kamala beach proved to be as difficult to find as the other three that we’d been looking for and it took about fifteen minutes of searching and driving down the wrong roads before we finally found it.
As it turned out Kamala beach turned out to be pretty hidden away but pretty nice (despite the sign which boasted ‘beach 280m’ I think it was a little further but it was worth finding) The beach was pretty long as and as is standard came with beautiful blue water, plenty of palm trees and perfectly soft sand.
Spending some time swimming in the water I took a walk down the beach but just as I returned to my seat to get comfortable we started to feel some spots of rain in the air. We started walking back towards to bikes to hop on them and try and find a place to shelter ourselves from the rain, but as it started to come down pretty heavily we headed to a restaurant and got some food while the weather calmed down.
About an hour later the rain had eased up and we decided to make the brave step of getting back onto our bikes in the wet weather. Eager to do some more exploring we decided to head to one of the other waterfalls on the map. Unfortunately we had some problems with directions again and after riding up and down several hills we’d ridden about as far as we could and got no closer to either of the four waterfalls that we’d tried to find. They can’t be that hidden surely!
As we rode along and navigated the wet patches on the road we decided to head back towards home as we were heading towards northern Phuket which was probably more than we could handle in one day.
It took us about an hour to get to wherever we were back to Karon and once back to the hotel we had a shower and rested before an evening of Muay Thai fighting which we’d both been looking forward to.
Now I’m not a big one for violence but Thai boxing is one of the countries proudest national sports and like karate or Tai Kwan Do it’s full of strict rituals and is mainly about self defence and respect. Knowing absolutely zero about the rules of Thai boxing I decided to take in an evening of fighting to see for myself what it was all about.
Before we headed to the ‘Biggest Fight of the Month’ we decided to get a taxi down to the arena. Hoping to get into a tuk-tuk (special Thai taxi) we were disappointed to discover that we were given a lift in a minibus but at least we made it there. The Muay Thai boxing arena wasn’t as far away as we thought it would be and as we arrived a couple of hours early we decided to head for some food, and finding an ‘Irish Bar’ in a shopping mall just off Patong Beach we had some food, a couple of drinks and played a game of darts on, for once, a real board.
Having been turned away the first time we tried to get into the stadium for being there too early we took another walk around the mall and came back as the repetitive announcement told us at ‘9pm’. As it turned out when we got there, what it needed to say was that doors opened at 9pm and action wasn’t to get underway till an hour later. Apparenelty not everyone had been told that and some people sat there with us for the next sixty minutes wondering when the action was going to begin.
The arena that the boxing was being held in was a lot more ‘advanced’ than I thought it would be. I figured it would be in some underground Fight Club-esque arena but there was a reasonable sized ring and plenty of seats around the outside. Having picked ourselves up some ‘VIP’ seats we were extremely close to the ring and as 10pm arrived things got started once everyone had got to their seats.
The night’s bouts started off, rather awkwardly, with the 60lbs category, which basically meant that the first fight was between two eight-year-olds. As the people around us were about 55% women, they were even less impressed than we were to be watching two kids so young battling it out. To be fair to them, the two kids held their own quite well and although the one from the blue corner probably landed more punches than his opponent, we didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of a knock-out or one of them getting cut.
We were lucky enough in the second flight to see a knock-out in our second fight as a European fighter, I think he was from England knocked out his Thai opponent in the first round. We had a couple of disappointing fights to sit through next as two women battled it out and then two Thai fighters basically battled out a draw. The next one we saw reminded us how close to the ring we were as a guy from England got a cut on his eye and the programme we had sitting next to us got covered in blood, as did everyone in the row in front of us. The guy eventually gave up after he stopped being able to see which I figured was probably-wise.
A few fights later we got to see the ‘Amco’ title belt change hands as some showboating old man fighter, who spent about five minutes before the beginning of the fight dancing around and taunting his opponent got knocked out within the first round and after his showboating a big cheer went up when he ate the canvas in under two minutes.
The ninth, and last fight we saw was probably the closest as some guys who came down to the ring with money wrapped around their neck were obviously fighting for some kind of prize fund and were reasonably closely matched so even though both of them went down once neither of them gave up until the last round and in the end the guy who we thought would win from the red corner took a narrow victory.
I personally had a great evening watching the action and although the fighting was pretty brutal it was interesting to watch and there certainly was some adrenelin pumping when people were landing punches and kicks on one another. As I was in Thailand I figured it was a one time only thing and unlike some people in the crowd I wouldn’t be taking my ten-year old kids to watch!
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