I looked in the mirror the other morning to notice I was somewhat more out of shape than I had planned. Exact details are perhaps unecessary - a chin fractionally more podgy than I remembered, a stomach... Anyway, the end result is that I have postponed my exit from Bangkok and enrolled in a Thai Boxing class.

While eating less etc will clearly play a part, I wanted to finally do some real exercise, so wandered over to a gym in the Khao San road area and booked my belly in.

The Sor Vorapin gym is off a simple small alley, tin shack-houses, past 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. Someone shouts up to an upstairs room, the trainer, Mu, comes down. He is very dark, wearing only 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 presumptious for being taller than him, from a distance he seemed huge.

We begin with skipping - the instructors wave us over to the side of the gym and I try and skip in front of a mirror. Skipping for twenty minutes is a lot more work than it sounds.
Then the foreign students are called into the ring for warm up and stretching. The first day there were five foreign students - I quickly realised I was the worst by a long way. I had hopes that the Irish guy (Nick) might also be a flabby weakling, but as the class began, he stripped off his t-shirt to reveal a torso looking like the ripples of a frozen wave. Damn. As it turned out, he had been thai boxing for three years back in Dublin and had come to Thailand to spend three weeks in a Muay Thai camp near the city. He had just finished his three weeks, so his technique was, shall we say, pretty good.
The first day, I was the only one keeping my top on, somewhat embarrassed how I compared to the other more muscular visiting students (let alone the Thais), but by the end of the session my t-shirt was so sodden with sweat it looked as though it had just come out of a washing machine. So the second day I revealed my stomach for all to see.

Mu, with guitar, is on the right, the instructor with the big stomach is on the left:

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. I had this sensing that reinvention was possible, that I never wanted to be put in the same unpleasant situations my school years had offered me. So it seemed some martial arts might be a good idea as part of that. 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 on their way to a painful meeting with the ground.
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 that great physical condition. But it was a nice confidence booster to feel, maybe, if something happened I could at least maybe punch properly.
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 way 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 Bob Breen, who ran a martial arts centre in East London. When I moved to live near Old Street tube station, I discovered I was only a ten minutes walk from this place, The Academy - a crumbling old school building, surrounded by the fancy bars of Hoxton Square. The Academy taught a mixture of Eskrima, Thai Boxing and Jeet Kune Do, the style Bruce Lee designed.

Studying Eskrima, Jeet Kune Do and Thai Boxing, through my instructors a world history of beating people up was given to me. Lucky told us about ancient Burmese invasions of Thailand and how, by burning the then Thai capital Ayuthaya, they destroyed most records and knowledge of Thai martial arts, leaving alive only the most widespread, Muay Thai. My teachers in The Academy would discuss the differences between Wing Chun side kicks and Muay Thai side kicks, and the different block required to intercept the much more damaging Thai move. These teachers would quote western boxing and fencing in the same breath as Indonesian Pensat Silat or Chinese Kung Fu.

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.
Like, for example, reading Salman Rushdie talking about literature, or Bruce Chatwin talking about art, these were times of realising how fascinating, how intricate the human world is, how far some people and cultures go towards what humanity's potential sounds like (even if it was, in this case, our potential to thwack each other).

I actually almost went to a town on the Thai - Burmese border because of one of these stories. Lucky described once the illegal fights that happen somewhere just inside Thailand, where Burmese boxers cross over in order challenge Thais - the fights were bareknuckles and more than sometimes fatal. But where this precisely took place, he had never said. In a cafe in Chiang Mai, I happened to read about these fights in a magazine, and finally, heard the name of the town - Mae Sot. I was all on the verge of heading out there, if somewhat nervous, when I read in the Lonely Planet that these bouts were annual, and took place each April. After years of searching, I was a month too late.

Anyway, while if I go to the Philippines, I would love to study some Eskrima, I hadn't planned to take any Muay Thai classes in Thailand. The reason is that I didn't feel even slightly ready for the intensity of studying 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 accomodate 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 four hundred baht lesson fee just for that.

I spend some time with one young instructor practicing basic punch combos - "one two", he shouts again and again. When I do it right he mutters, "Aaaah"! I spend some time with the man who I think is the second in command, a very short Thai with a round belly like an egg. He thinks my punches are ok, my kicks need work, but my elbow strikes are awful. He takes 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 practice over and over (after two days my right elbow has a red broken welt on it and I am taking a day off to help it heal).
Then I go into the ring to practice with Mu. He has pads on his arms, shins and torso - he moves his pads one way and I kick, moves them again and I launch a knee strike at his stomach. He keeping shouting, "Power, power!" - harder, harder. He says, "feet together, no power - foot back, power"! He and I practice boxing for a while, I try to land some light hits on him, he tries to land some on me, with somewhat more success. What I like about the class, is that while Mu sets hard standards, he is 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 twenty press ups, fifty sit ups, twenty back stretches, and as I work through the sit ups, the instructor with the round belly comes over and puts his foot on my stomach, just to make it harder for me.

If that sounds hard work, it is nothing compared to what the Thais do. There are a couple of students in the class that look quite frightening, one V-shaped guy does strange press ups that look all but impossible, another stands at the punch bag next to mine and attempts to murder it - his whipping kicks and elbows look more like sword strikes than something a human should be able to do. And Nick and Mu circle each other in the ring, Mu demonstrating how to counter an attempted knee attack with a side step that flows into an elbow strike to the face.

--

The Thai students combine their stone physiques with the mentality of silly adolescents. They are always playing and wrestling with each other, every woman that walks past they are shouting out to and trying to impress. 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 join the class immediately become exempt from these antics. The boxers play with the toddler of the woman running the nearby noodle soup stall, pose for random backpackers' photographs and after one lesson ended, two of them wrap towels around their heads and pretend to sing and guitar to some Thai rock on the CD player.

After one class, Nick, the enormous Dutch student, "Beer", Mu and I went to a little restaurant together. Mu is from a small town a long way from Bangkok. He said a little niece of his had just told him, "I want a Farang boyfriend"! He said he replied, "Slow-ly, slow-ly. Find a good Farang, that's ok. Bad Farang, not ok. Don't come to here in Bangkok, too many bad Farangs". Us three Farangs at the table couldn't really dispute this advice.
After the meal, Mu took Beer and I to see him play Thai foot-volleyball - his friends played in a small court inside the grounds of a huge temple. This game is an amazing spectacle, something to track down if you are ever in Thailand. Like an entire game made up of those Nike adverts where Beckham etc do bicycle kicks and leaping twists to catch the ball. A hard, hollow ball, twice the size of a tennis ball, a net separating two teams of three. They can use their feet, knees and heads, and players regularly leap into the air and spin their kicking leg round their body to smash the ball over the net. We walked into the Wat grounds, as we passed a golden shrine, Mu stopped and suggested we make a prayer, "Good luck, good power". As soon as Beer and I arrived, one of the waiting players came over and filled my hands with lychee for us to snack on. We watched their acrobatics for a while in awe.

--

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 ironically, 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 England, I think. In my one experience of anything approaching contact sparring in Thai Boxing (I had no idea beforehand that the class was sparring instead of techniques), after the two hour class 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.

--

Right now in Bangkok, I am having a wonderful time. I would say, from this experience, if you want to relax, want to deepen your relish for life - forget lolling on a beach for a week. Go somewhere warm, do a few hours of intense exercise each day, eat good food to replenish what is burned off and have something to occupy your mind. For me, the latter is writing, using the internet and reading Italo Calvino's brilliant, misdirecting book, "If on a winter's night a traveller".
I feel very calm and happy at this moment. I often have felt that being perhaps rather pensive and questioning, while useful and rewarding in its own way, probably stops me relishing and relaxing into life the way some people can. These last few days however, I have woken up each morning after a good full sleep, and as consciousness dawns I think to myself, "Ah-ha, today I will do this, meet that person, send an email to that magazine". A smiles grows on my face as I wake, and I go to sleep content.
It isn't just the boxing - I don't think I would be feeling this way were I not liking Bangkok so much. I can only say that my preconceptions of "Bang Cock" (and Thailand) were very wrong, and that my only defense is that all the accounts of it I'd heard did the place an injustice. While there is sleaze here, you have to go looking for it (so like every big city), and while there are lots of other tourists, they stay on Khao San - walk two minutes and leave them behind.
Aside from negatives proved only partly true, there is also something very artistic, very creative about Thailand. There are so many great looking little bars here, little shops that I walk in and think, "forget buying something, I want my house to look like this". There is a very free, exploring new ideas, studenty feeling about various areas of Bangkok, a sense of modern which doesn't feel like an imitation of Western culture. Those great looking bars I mentioned can't be meant for foreigners, because so few of us seem to be in them night after night.

I went to an art exhibition in the National Gallery, "Globalisation vs Identity" (modern art from around South East Asia). They didn't have change for me, so let me in free - and gave me a tour for free, which was nicely unexpected. It was mainly interesting in terms of getting indications of how Thailand sees the West (and itself). Traditional Thai art is "vibrant", a word used over and over - Western art is "realistic". Western people are, "serious", Thai people, " joyful". Here is a photo I really liked - a cowboy riding a horse with strange black markings on its side. The title is somewhat anti-American...
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I was walking randomly, when I came to a t-shirt shop, "Everyday Bangkok". It is a small shop selling t-shirts and bags that they make themselves - the son (an architecture student) makes the prints, the mother runs the shop during the day, and the son's girlfriend comes by in the evening and translates shopper requests if necessary. I saw a t-shirt caption that I instantly loved, and asked them to make up one for me - size:large, colour:light blue, writing:red. The caption reads:

Don't follow me, I'm lost too!

It was rather expensive, 250 baht, but individualism is expensive in these days, and sometimes I think you have to decide where you want your money to go. I was happy to help out this eight month old shop instead of haggling with a dodgy Khao San stall or ringing the till of a big Siam Square mall. And, their little shop looked fantastically stylish, a kind of Beatles' sixties take on IKEA. I was only half joking when I asked them if they would design my house when I finally get one.

Daniel, 26 May 2004, Bangkok