Beach Day and Fight Night

Today Philip was ill. He didn't feel well at breakfast. It turned out that he had a fever and spent the rest of the day in bed. He says that it isn't so bad, but he still prefers to stay in bed in the AC room.

The rest of us decided to walk to the attractive part of Chaweng beach for a beach day. It is a 20 min walk along the beach, but there are many things to look at on the way, so it was OK even for Miki.

Perfect beach: fine powder sand, shallow water, small waves.

Bying BBQ'ed chicken at the beach

In the evening we went to Petch Buncha Stadium to pick up tickets for the Muay Thai show of the evening. There was a lot of commotion in the city with truck driving around making advertisement in loudspeakers for the show. The show didn't start until 9 pm, so we went for dinner at a nearby night market in the meantime.

Waiting for pancakes at the night market.

We bought some small souvenirs at the stalls.

Then we went back to the stadium. A lot of scooters were parked in front of the entrance but there was still a lot of space in the stadium. We got some good seats close to the ring. They played loud music and ran some videos about the fighters on a big screen. We got some beers from girls selling drinks at the seats. After ca. half an hour the action finally started. We stood up for the Thai national anthem and then the first fighters came in. They did some kind of weird dance to traditional Thai music played live at the stadium. And then the fighting started.

Oh, dammit. We had to leave our guns at the door.

Waiting for the action to start

The line-up

The program

The betting paper

The first junior fighters start.

The sound level increased as the fights became progressively more important and bets were placed... The Thai section went wild when this guy won. One of the betting parties gave this guy a money note after winning.

After the third event (out of 6) there was a "Son of Rambo" show with this guy. He was pretty good and we liked it.

The main events were the two last fights: the Phuket champ against the Samui champ (Phuket won...) and Tomas Superprosamui (Dutch) against Petmai (Thai). Tomas was really good but eventually, and to us at least, surprisingly lost.

We got home close to 1 am. Miki had been tired at some point during the show and slept a bit, but now he was wide awake. We found Philip sleeping. He woke up a bit and said he wasn't doing too bad.

I went to buy some snacks at the nearby 7eleven and we had a very late night meal before going to bed. It had been a brilliant day.