I don’t really know what to do with myself in Bangkok as it is so sprawling and there are no individual attractions that stand out to me.
At lunchtime, I get a Thai pizza experience, dining at a bakery restaurant just down the path from our hotel. It’s a very good one too, thought the sauce base was a little too dry, but I give it a 9/10.
In the evening, I join Laurie and Gary to go to see some Thai boxing. It’s expensive at 2,000 Baht for ‘first class seats’, which is the equivalent of £50. However, the seats we are escorted to are front row ringside, at one of the boxers’ corners. The cheaper option was standing in the circle behind us, but that was still 1,000B. There are probably a few hundred in the stands, and one side of the stadium is empty, but there are TV cameras there.
There are seven fights on the bill, but we are told by an usher that the main fight is the fourth one. For this fight, the boxer in our corner is called Thomas, who is a Brit of Thai origin and this is why the usher put us in this corner. Most of the fights involve boxers of not much more than 100 lbs, but the main fight with Thomas is the 160 lb-ers fight, which passes for heavy weight in Thai boxing.
We are served beer at our seats and Gary and I agree that this is much better than sitting in a pub. Going out to the smoking area, I walk past the open fighters’ room and the fighters that have finished sit on the benches opposite talking to spectators. The British fighter is triumphant, his fight having been stopped by the referee. There were no knock-outs as such, will all the falls being due to slips, trips or missed kicks.
Most of the people in the ringside area are westerners, with the Thais filling the upper stand behind us. After the main fight, the latter leave the arena, with the last few fights reverting back to the light weight kids who look about fifteen, not that I would like to take any of them on.
On the way back to the hotel, we stop at Mulligans, where we find Just John, Shay, Stacie, JC, Rhi, Andrew, chef Martin, and possibly a few others. When we leave the bar, we are invited to take a ride to see a ‘Ping Pong’ show by some tuk-tuk drivers, which at 300B seems expensive to see a bit of table tennis. We go anyway, and our group bundle ourselves into two tuk-tuks, with me laying myself across the laps of JC, Rhi and Andrew. The ride quickly turns into a race after we tell our driver that we will pay him double the fare if he gets there first. The driver makes the tuk-tuk do a wheelie in his haste and, with the two tuk-tuks side by side, Shay in the other one takes one of my shoes from my feet dangling out of the side.
At the entrance to the unmarked building, I take a picture of the group inside the door. Although the background shows only a wall, I am quickly surrounded by some intimidating types who insist on taking my camera to delete the picture.
There follows the seediest thing I ever saw. In a dark room with a hundred or seats surrounding a small lit stage, a succession of women walk on in the underwear, unceremoniously remove their garments and proceed to pull various ribbons and bows out of their privates. The ‘Ping Pong’ is a woman standing up and dropping the ball out of her so that it bounces into a jug. There is a perfunctory sex show which is like watching an aerobics video, with the couple changing positions every few seconds then just as quickly trotting off the stage.
We leave after forty minutes or so when the show starts repeating, with all of us feeling somewhat morally depleted.
We had heard stories about people in these places being forced to buy drinks at gargantuan prices, but all I ever paid was the entrance fee, having drunk enough to satisfy out thirst at the boxing and then Mulligans.
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