We arrived in Bangkok late on thursday night and didn't have much trouble finding some cheap and reasonably good accomadation. We were absolutely shattered from the journey and so quickly grabbed some food and had a wander down the Khao San road before bed.

Friday was a reasonably relaxed day of exploring and finding our feet in Bangkok. We also found a Muay Thai boxing gym, which we thought might be a fun thing to try the following day. In the evening we grabbed some food from some street stalls: one vegi Pad Thai and two beef kebabs, both delicious, all for the low low price of 50p! After that we decided to grab a couple of beers, which ended up being going clubbing until around 1am.

The following day after lunch we headed down to the Muay Thai gym for a bit of a workout. The warmup was 10minutes of skipping after which they strapped up your fists just like a boxers. After the skipping came the shadow boxing, sure that sounds easy, but they pushed us so hard that we could barely hold our arms up in the guard position(see picture above). Then came sparring in the ring, which turned out to be more tiring still, but was in much shorter bursts. It soon became clear to me that all my power was in my punching and elbowing and that my kicks needed a little work! After a short rest of pouring iced water over myself it was onto more sparring. This time it was all punching with the tiny, but fearsome, man doing the shadow boxing before. He was impressed by my power but still worked me into the ground! Just because training up until then had been a picnic they moved us onto the fitness work! Running, jumping, lots of pressups, leg lifts followed by 100 sit ups and some stretching. Genuinely it is one of the hardest 2hour sessions I have ever been through.

By the time Rory and I came to leave we could barely move so decided that it was the ideal time to try out a famous Thai massage. At first it was hard to relax while I was being pushed and prodded, but after not too long I am pretty sure I turned into a liquid. I was so relaxed I couldn't even move! After the massage we grabbed a quick dinner and played a couple of games of chess before having an early night as we were both dead on our feet!