Team Quest Thailand Muay Thai Festival
For those of you who have never been to
a Thai festival, you are really missing out. Periodically through out
the year different towns will host a festival where people from all
around the region will come and celebrate. The festivals are a
collection of fair games, amazing food, partying, music, and Muay
Thai. They are usually held in huge fields in the country side.
The fairs typically start out with
people eating some nice food and walking around and just enjoying the
atmosphere. Although these are family friendly, usually most of the
adults start hitting the booze. After a while some local bands start
to play and this is when the festivals get good. Everybody starts to
dance and really enjoy themselves. The music goes on for quit a
while. At some point usually around 10pm the Muay Thai fights begin.
Now remember, most of these are in the country side so it's very rare
to have foreigners on these Muay Thai cards. So when a foreigner
rocks up they are treated like a superstar. A lot of these thai
people might never have seen a foreigner before or possibly only a
few.
Here is a video of the festivals. You
can see the Muay Thai ring at the end.
I'll share with you our last experience
at one of these fairs. So on a Saturday morning a local promoter
called us up and asked if we had any foreigners who would like to
fight at his fair in the Lampang province. Now, we live in the Chiang
Mai province so this is a bit of a trek for us. He assured us that it
was only 1 hour a way. The problem with the Lampang province is that
it is rather big.
We had a fighter named Steve from
Australia step up and take the fight. So we packed into our truck and
started heading to Lampang. This is where it started to become shady.
After about 1 hour we were only 33% of the way there on the map.
Remember that we still have training sessions on Saturday afternoon
so we didn't actually leave from the gym until about 7pm. So after
getting lost, misdirected, a flat tire, we were starting to get a bit
worried we wouldn't make it on time.
After about 3 hours we finally found
it. We were in the sticks. This was the definition of Thai country
side. We rocked up and the atmosphere was awesome. The Muay Thai
fights had already started and we just got told that our fighter was
the next fight. So we rush to get out of the truck and literally
every single Thai person stopped to stare at us. We showed up with
about 10 foreigners which is about 9 more than any of them had seen
in there life. We rushed through the crowd to the Muay Thai ring and
started prepping Steve for the fight.
The great part about it is that we had
been reserved front row VIP seats by the promoter and the Team Quest
Thailand students were offered free whiskey in a friendly offer from
the him. It was a really cool experience but at this point I just
started to get a bad feeling. The crowd seemed to be a little biased
to say the least. Most were very much rooting for their fellow Thai
Muay Thai fighter.
So the fight began and right off the
bat I could see we were a little mismatched. The promoter told us
that the Thai fighter only had 5 fights which was equivalent to
Steve's experience. The fact that the Thai fighter had a good 5
kilo's on him didn't make me feel to good either. I could tell after
the first minute this guy had 100 + fights. But Steve was a warrior
and put on a very good first round.
The second round is where it got a bit
sketch. In typical Thai style the opponent was very relaxed and
started to open up a bit more in this round. I forgot to mention this
guy had tree trucks for legs and kicked like a mule. So during this
round things got a little weird. Some random racist old Thai man
threw a half full beer at Steve's head during the fight and yelled
some racist stuff in Thai. Now remember, this is Thailand's country
side so it is the equivalent of any countries sticks. Usually these
area's are less educated and not as tolerable of outsiders. The old
man disappeared into the Huge uncontrolled crowd. This festival is
completely uncontrolled. There is no security guards to sorta grab
this guy and push him out the door.
At this point the fight was obviously
stopped and random people tried to solve the situation. Lucky for us
our Thai trainer ping went crazy and took matters into his own hands.
He tried to go after the guy but was held back. Not many people
actually knew who did it but Ping saw the guy do it. So Ping jumped
into the ring and demanded either the guy fight him now in the ring
on the spot or gets thrown out. So the crowd did some self policing
so pushed this guy to the street where he was forced to walk home and
think about what he had just done. Most of the Thai people were happy
to host us. It's always just one person that ruins it for everyone.
So the second round began again and
Steve fought on like a warrior. In the 3 round the Thai picked it up
a bit more. His experience, better technique, and size advantage was
to much to overcome. The Thai eventually stopped Steve with a brutal
body kick. It was ok though, I was proud of Steve for stepping up and
fighting this guy on 12 hour notice. He could have opted out after he
seen the size of this guy but he didn’t' care, he just wanted to
fight.
So the fight was finished and we were
planning on sticking around a bit longer to enjoy the festival. At
this time everybody started to get a bit more rowdy. This is typical
at any place where people have been drinking alcohol for 6 hours
straight. Thai people started to physically fight with each other and
people were passed out everywhere. It was time to count our blessings
and hit the road.
Although it sounded like a bit of a bad
story, it was actually a lot of fun. Steve wasn't hurt more than just
typical soreness from being kicked by a mule. Nothing was broken or
needed medical supervision. So we pretty much got out of the ring and
went straight back to our truck. We left about midnight and pretty
much had the same journey back that we had on the way there. We got
lost and misguided by locals. I think we rocked up at like 4am and
everyone was ready to just pass out.
