That One Time I Went Boxing on Ko Phi Phi

I spent a lot of my first trip around the world partying. I was twenty-five and ready to cut loose after a quarter century of living a fairly sheltered, middle-class life. In my mind, a lot of backpacking was about meeting fellow travelers, partying, and saying yes to anything that came your way. And that often lead to some outrageous experiences.

Like getting into a boxing ring in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand.

Before I began that trip in 2006, I used the website MySpace to meet travelers in advance, since, as an introvert, I was very worried that I wouldn’t make any friends on the road. MySpace had a lot of travel groups, so I reached out to people in hopes of meeting up with them on the trip. (I was early to using the web as a social tool: I had a blog in 2001, and I met my first girlfriend on Friendster back when meeting people online was taboo.)

After landing in Bangkok at the end of that year, I happened to run into Lindsay in the airport, a Brit I was scheduled to meet later that week in Krabi. She was with her friends John and Stephanie. As luck would have it, we were on the same flight to Phuket, so we decided to start our trip together early.

In Phuket, we had booked lodging at the hostel made famous by the movie The Beach. It was as terrible as the film made it out to be, with thin walls, dirty bathrooms, and hard beds. We stayed one night.

From there, we went to Ko Phi Phi, where we planned to spend three nights. The island was still reeling from the tsunami that had devastated it two years before, a cacophony of noise as it tried to rebuild itself. There was debris and construction everywhere, and many businesses were still closed and homes abandoned.

We found a cheap room on the far end of the main town, bunking together to save money, a traveler’s most precious commodity.

That night, we did what backpackers do on the island: we partied. We ate cheap food in the bustling night market, with vendors selling overpriced pad thai to travelers who didn’t know better. From there, went from bar to bar, getting progressively drunker, before ending up at the Reggae Bar, which is famous for two reasons: buckets of cheap booze and a boxing ring in the center.

But the ring isn’t for watching professional Thai boxers. No, it’s there so backpackers can watch other backpackers beat the shit out of each other for free buckets of booze. (A “bucket” is Thai whiskey, Red Bull, and Coke in a child’s beach pail. It gets you very smashed.)

As we…