Muay Thai ... yesterday's post, due to stupid broken internet.

Woke up today with an sense of excitement. Super-sunny, and today is EXPLORING day. Popped to the beach for *ahem* breakfast (omelette with avo and a coconut), and am writing this on the BB while I await it's arrival. This is the beach on a less sunny day:

Charlie, you asked if they had any interesting birds here, well there are some that you would never, ever have seen or heard before, because they are the rarest of all rareness:

Ahem.

Last night's muay thai was FANTASTIC! We left at 8ish in scooter convoy, and headed 30 mins down the road to the main town on the island: Chaweng. Koh Samui has tried to revamp it's imagine of late according to the regulars and the locals. There is a strange mix of normal locally life outside of the bigger towns, in the touristy towns it's all ladyboys, HedKandi and Full Moon parties and and a fair few letchy old men with STUNNING Thai 'girls' - though I'd imagine a few actually are girls, FWIW. In the slightly more off-the-track places there are loads of top notch 5* places on the beach - there's even a Nikki Beach here now. Strange mix. I digress. It's just bizarre for an island that is maybe 35 miles to drive right around the outside. I do like the fact that a lot of 'local' still exists too.

Muay Thai: because it was a 30 minute scoot I elected to wear jeans and trainery shoes, rather than small dress and flip flops. That was great for the drive, but when I arrived: HAAAAWT. Very, very hawt. Paid THB1000 to get in, which is the princely sum of £20. Because it's Chaweng Stadium, it was probably about 60% tourists, but I was glad to see that the locals get a special section in prime seats that us touristos aren't allowed to use.  There were also the "expensive" seats, at THB1500, which turned out to be about as close to the action as mine, but they were big squishy green laz-e-boyz, so I had instant envy:

When we arrived, a friendly lady(ish) at outside bar stopped contorting around a pole in order to help me to park my scooter, as the place was rammed, and we made our way up to the seats. Bar was selling an array of booze, but am sticking to the water til I leave Thai soil (read: tomorrow night 2 minutes after takeoff). There were 9 fights, and they are 5 rounds of 3 minutes each:

The evening begins with the lightest fighters (110lbs) and steadily they get heavier, up to 160lbs. Only one of them was anything but pure muscle. The first 2 looked like they weren't a day over 16, and v v skinny, but they still came on swathed in the shiny bath-robe things to 'Eye of the Tiger'. Class. They start with about 2 minutes of what I guess probably relates pretty closely to the haka - a kind of traditional dance thing which respects their parents, the sport, their belief system etc. And then it's ding-ding: game on! So, first-off: the v v young ones:

Then they got bigger, and older and more experienced, so the excitement level rose and the gambling happening in the Thai section increased rapidly! Apparently they will literally gamble on anything, and it's a bit of an art form. Like watching that bloody moron who I cannot stand doing the horst-racing on TV. The one in the hat. John McCririck or whatever his stupid, fat, lumpy name is. I digress. They changed referee half-way through from slim and quiet referee, who broke things up fairly quickly to a lardy referee who let the pumelling continue, shouted a lot, and also didn't seen to feel the need to apply the blood rules. I think he may have been hitting the hard stuff, because at one point he was also on the canvas, which struck me as sliiiightly unconventional:

As we got to the last fight, the atmosphere was electric (and quite smokey and boozy), a lot of the tourists had left to hit the bars, as it was getting late (gone midnight) and so there were a lot more Thais there, and the standard was very high. The last fight featured Swedish-bloke v Thai-bloke their names were all fairly elaborate. And it was a corker.

Intially I thought the meatball was going to get the kicking of his life, and after a decent heel to the forehead, he turned red. And I mean that in the blood sense. Eww.

After which the Swede started seeing red in all senses, and quite quickly he took the lardster down. One rule of muay thai which is quite interesting is the whole it's ok to hit a guy who is down rule. So, as you an see from the following 2, Swede has Lardster in the corner, cowering, looking totally beaten...but he's not on the canvas, so Swede punches him to the ground while he's swaying and undefended. Innnnnteresting:

Cause and effect:

Wow. What an eye-opener of an evening for me.