We woke up yesterday feeling kind of sore. I think in our old age our tolerance for uncomfortable sleeping situations has lessened. Hug hostel is really great for young budget conscious travelers as it’s around $5 but we have “standards” now. The hostel itself wasn’t as clean or updated as it could have been and there was nowhere to hang our stuff like wet towels. I did some quick searches in the morning and found another hostel that was a 10 min walk down the street. I managed to cancel the remaining stay and they only charged us $11 for the night we stayed.
We switched to Hostel by Bed (weird name), it’s much nicer, there’s free breakfast and it’s got a really trendy feel to it. The only issue I have is that my bunk mate won’t leave me alone.
We both kind of got strong headaches later in the morning. I think we may have gotten dehydrated while walking around looking for lunch. Considering we had a full next day at the elephant sanctuary, I figured we could just stay in and finish watching LOTR Return of the King extended edition. I started watching Fellowship of the Ring at the beginning of the trip and Joanna was making fun of me saying how boring the extended editions are since they’re like +3 hours long each, not even halfway through the first movie she was fully invested. Guess we’re going to have to make a trip to New Zealand now…
Headaches subsided around 9pm, I was hanging out in the hostel lobby when a guy approached me asking if I wanted to join him and his group to see Thai boxing. I try to say yes to any opportunity that presents itself and agreed to go. A few people were on the fence but the final group was Joanna, me, Ross from Scotland, and Julien from the Netherlands. We piled into a tuk tuk and told him to take us to the boxing stadium.
He asked if we had tickets for the boxing match, Joanna said no. Big mistake. He ended up driving us to his friend’s ticket counter and we paid them 600 bht for “VIP ringside seats”. The stadium was shady AF. We walked in and there were 2 kids probably 10 years old just wailing on each other. Pretty sure we got scammed coming here because we were told and we expected a typical boxing match.
I did a quick google search on child boxing matches and read a Forbes article about it: It provides income to families that would otherwise have to rely on their rice paddies, and a way out of poverty for some children with few options. Child boxers can earn as much in a night as their parents can farming rice in a year. Source
You feel really bad but if this is a way to get out of poverty, I guess this is the only option they have.
The rest of the fights made this feel more apparent that it was a tourist thing and not an event that the locals attended because the announcers all spoke English. There was a blindfold round and a “World championship” round between a girl from Thailand and one from Singapore.
