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Travelling and losing weight don't always go together, I discovered. Ten months into my round the world trip, about to head south from Bangkok, I looked in the mirror to notice I was somewhat more out of shape than I had planned. Exact details are perhaps unnecessary - a chin fractionally more podgy than I remembered, a stomach... The end result is that I postponed my exit from Bangkok, and later that day enrolled in a Thai Boxing class. The Sor Vorapin gym is off a small alley, in the tourist heartland of Khao San; tin shack-houses, noodle soup stands, a very large mature women who insists on going topless. The gym is open to the street - four hanging punch bags, skipping ropes, weights, a ring for sparring. The two hour classes cost 400 baht (about 10 US dollars) each, with discounts available if you book several sessions. Someone shouts up to an upstairs room, the trainer, Mu, comes down. He is very dark, wearing only the bright red Thai boxing shorts, and although he is short and solidly built, he has an obvious litheness about him. He shakes my hand; I feel rather presumptuous for being taller than him, from a distance he seemed huge.

To explain my interest in martial arts, and why I had always planned not to study Muay Thai in Thailand, requires something of a story.

I began studying martial arts when I arrived at University, as part of my plan to become a different, more confident person than I had been during my school years. In freshers' week I signed up for a style of Jujitsu - throws and locks predominantly. While it was a fun class, I was never very good at it, and I never really believed I would be able to intercept someone's punch and whistle them through the air etc.

In my last year in University, I started studying in the class of a rather enthusiastic and eccentric Indian man called, "Lucky". Lucky taught a combined class of Eskrima, from the Philippines (fighting with sticks, knives and bare hands), and Thai Boxing. I loved the intricacy of Eskrima: once you learned moves using a three foot bamboo stick, you could pick up a knife, half a pool cue, even nunchuks (maybe) and use the same system. And Thai Boxing was quite obviously an awesomely brutal style. I feel that if one studies something like Aikido or Jujitsu for ten years, then yes, you would be able to redirect attackers' energy and all that, but Thai Boxing just seemed to patently work, even after two weeks of classes. Not that I was ever very good at it, or at all good at fighting - I'm quite the physical coward when facing anyone aside from small children, cats and old women, and never was in especially good physical condition. But it was a nice confidence booster to feel! , maybe, if something happened I could at least maybe punch properly.
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But also, Thai Boxing is great for fitness. It is a quite gruelling martial art to follow, and many of the moves assume a level of physical hardness far beyond other styles. As an example, the Muay Thai block to a kick coming in from the side (towards your thigh or stomach) is simply to raise your shin so that your opponent's shin smashes into yours (forming a cross - the attacker's horizontal, your's vertical). I can only assure readers how incredibly painful that would be - I've felt only a fraction of it in class - suffice to say taking/doing one such block would leave most of us limping in agony for quite some time. This physical conditioning is, I think, most of the reason why Muay Thai is so feared by martial artists of other schools. Lucky had learnt a lot of his Thai Boxing from an Englishman called Bob Breen. When I moved back to London after University, I discovered I was only a ten minutes walk from Bob's martial arts centre, The Academy - a crumbling old school building, surrounded by the fancy bars and cafes of Hoxton Square. The Academy taught a combination of Eskrima, Thai Boxing and Jeet Kune Do, the style Bruce Lee designed.

This all reached an apogee when I attended a day's lecture / demonstration by Dan Inosanto, the man who, so I was told, had taught Bruce Lee Eskrima and helped him design a lot of Jeet Kune Do. This tiny Filipino (now in his sixties) told us stories of Filipino-Japanese machete skirmishes in high jungle grass during WWII, how a certain kick from an eastern martial art reminded him of "Angolan Capoeira", how this particular three punch training routine he was showing us never worked with "Bruce", as Lee's hands were too just fast and Inosanto could never move his pads quick enough to block the last move. 

Now, if I ever go to the Philippines, I would love to study some Eskrima, but I hadn't planned to take any Muay Thai classes in Thailand. The reason was that I didn't feel even slightly ready for the intensity of the real thing in Thailand - I wasn't properly conditioned or fit. It would be like showing up at the Tour de France without a bike. However, given this urge to do some exercise, I figured a gym in Khao San tourist land would be more than able to accommodate me, so had far fewer concerns than had I stumbled on a training camp somewhere in the countryside.

The class began. One of the instructors called me over and began wrapping my hands and wrists with an off white Muay Thai band, meant to shield my fists under the boxing glove. It was a moment so iconic in our Hollywood world that it was worth the lesson fee just for that.

I spent some time with one young instructor practising basic punch combos - "one two", he shouted again and again. Whenever I got it right he muttered, "Aaaah"! The man who I think was the second in command, a very short Thai with a round belly like an egg, thought my punches were OK, my kicks needed work, but my elbow strikes were awful. He took me over to a pad mounted on a wall to show me how to angle the point of my elbow into someone's face... I practiced over and over (after two days my right elbow had a red broken welt on it and I take a day off to help it heal).
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Then I got into the ring to practice with Mu. He wore pads on his arms, shins and stomach - he moved his pads one way and I kick, moved them again and I launch a knee strike at his stomach. He kept shouting, "Power, power!" - harder, harder. He chided, "Feet together, no power - foot back, power"! He and I practiced boxing for a while, I tried to land some light hits on him, he tried to land some on me, with somewhat more success. What I liked about the class, is that while Mu sets hard standards, he was always realistic that I need to work up to them, e.g. forgiving me if I can't do the full twenty press ups required at the end of the two hours. The last warm down and stretches, then the twenty press ups, fifty sit ups, twenty back stretches, and as I worked through the sit ups, the instructor with the round belly came over and put his foot on my stomach, just to make it harder for me.

...
After the third day training with Mu, the warm down routine grew to fifty press ups and one hundred sit ups - sometimes with Mu kicking my stomach on each "up" of my press ups. If that sounds hard work, it is nothing compared to what the Thais do. There were a couple of students in the class that looked simply frightening, one V-torsoed guy doing strange bent knee press ups that looked all but impossible, another stood at the punch bag next to mine and attempted to murder it - his whipping kicks and elbows looked more like sword strikes than something a human should be able to do.

The Thai students combined their stone physiques with the mentality of silly adolescents. They were always playing and wrestling with each other, always shouting out and waving at every woman that walked past. I got the sense the same Thai girls walked past the gym every day, and every day the boxers tried the same crappy lines to impress them. Strangely though, any women that joined the class immediately became exempt from these antics. The boxers played with the toddler of the woman running the nearby noodle soup stall, posed for random backpackers' photographs, and after one lesson ended, two of them wrapped towels around their heads and pretended to sing and guitar to some Thai rock on the CD player. The atmosphere is as lighthearted as the training is serious - it is a good combination.

As a final comment on Muay Thai, if anyone reading is thinking of trying it out, I would really recommend it, if only for the fitness and flexibility benefits. I would just advise checking out the class beforehand, and talking with the instructor as to what a session actually involves. While, perhaps not surprisingly, it now seems to me that Thai instructors have a good sense of what beginners can and can't do, this isn't always the case in the West, I think. In my one experience of anything approaching contact sparring in London (I had no idea beforehand that the class was sparring instead of techniques), after the two hour session finished I had received: utter exhaustion, a bleeding toe, aching testicles, two dead legs (from the instructor, I think) and thighs so sore every time I sat down for the next couple of days they sang in pain. And, at the end of the class, the instructor chastised the more experienced students for being too easy on me.

So, just investigate carefully.

Daniel Wallace

The following is the first article Daniel wrote for the magazine:

Murder And Horses - Todosantos, Guatemala 

To contact Daniel Click Here

Daniel’s travels continue at http://blogs.bootsnall.com/dw
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