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September 16th 2007

Published: November 2nd 2007

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Bowthy

Hanging on

My bro´s first time in a Bangkok tuk-tuk

Bangkok

It was my brother's first time in Thailand so we did the sensible thing and headed to Pat Pong for some food, beers and, unexpectedly, live Thai kickboxing.The boxing wasn't "live" in the same way that football is live in pubs, it was actually two Thai blokes having a proper scrap in a tiny ring next to the bar. I'm guessing that they were once top fighters, but they were knocking on a bit. However, they could still pack a punch and the slightly nimbler of the pair managed to floor his opponent two or three times with an eye-wateringly solid right-hook. I wondered if they were just acting, but the tears in the bloodshot eyes of the floored boxer looked pretty real to me.

Welcome to Thailand

Fearing we were about to be fleaced, we followed the menu-wielding chap up the dimly-lit staircase on the promise of witnessing one of Bangkok's showbiz legends: yes, you guessed it, the Ping Pong show. We ordered a couple of beers and watched some girls dance around in their pants. One of them was crouched on the stage and I couldn't work out what she was up to. After a few minutes she stood up,

Live Boxing

Bangkok

smiling proudly, holding up a piece of paper on which was scrawled "Welcome to Thailand". It took a couple of minutes for us to realise why the hand-writing was so bad: it wasn't HAND writing. Chuckling, and feeling a bit grubby, we left before seeing any ping-pong ball fun to try to catch the Elvis/Tom Jones impersonator.

More Diving

Put off flying because of the recent plane crash, we spent a night on the sleeper-train, drinking excellent French wine (cheers, bro) and not getting any sleep (cheers, drunken Israeli). A bus and boat ride later and we landed on the island of Ko Tao to get some diving action. We were a bit surprised to hear from a local businessman that the whole island was, in his opinion, "rubbish" and "no good for diving". However, after a quick recce we found the excellent Big Fish Resort and Dive Centre. The Big Fish dive instructors and dive-masters were brilliant. My bro passed his Open Water exam with flying colours and I took a couple of fun dives. The visibility wasn't that great, but I still managed to see plenty of interesting marine life, including some colourful nudies (that's nudibranches).

Ang

Eye-watering

Thai Kick Boxing, Bangkok

Thong National ParkUnfortunately, Simon and I didn't manage to dive together as we both managed to pick up ear problems preventing us from equalising. Mine was from having a cold, and my brother's was from putting some of my ear-drops in his ear. D'oh! So, with diving out of the question, we headed to Ang Thong National Park, about two hours from Ko Samui.

We camped on the beach and had it pretty much to ourselves, apart from an army of gardeners determined to trim every inch of the island with their noisy strimmers. It sounded like Wimbledon race track on speedway night. At night it was quiet and the perfect place for a coconut-throwing competition and, early the next morning, watching the sunrise. We escaped the daytime noise by kayaking out to a couple of the other nearby islands where we had beach all to ourselves.

Over too quickly

Before we knew it we were on the day train back to Bangkok from Surat Thani, a journey of ten hours. The idea was to get a view of peninsula Thailand's countryside. However, we didn't realise that most of that stretch of land has been replaced by palm plantation,

I'll have the lot of you

Thai Kick Boxing, Bangkok

which is a very boring to look at. We managed to amuse ourselves, falling back on the brotherly staple of fighting over who had the chairs' central arm-rest and joining the other passengers in avoiding any eye-contact with the crazy lady carrying a Winnie-The-Pooh dressed in a penguin outfit. After a bottle of champers and a wobble round the Khao San Road area it was time to wave my brother off at the airport. It had been great couple of weeks and I was sad to see him go.

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