The Kao San road is aimed at the backpacker market, with hostels, street food, and souvenir stalls mostly selling T-shirts advertising local beer brands yes of course I got one, I am a cliche! I was shocked to see stalls selling fake ID cards, right out in the open. And surely if you take them up on the fake PADI scuba diving card, the joke is likely to be on you! The tuk tuk driver led us off down a dark alley to his tuk tuk.
He was legitimate and we found the tuk tuk and he proceded to drive like a maniac to the stadium, stopping only so he could buy a drink for himself on the way?! I followed some advice that a colleague had given me, to keep your elbows in! Anything hanging out of the tuk tuk is at risk of being seriously hurt! At the Muay Thai stadium, we had been briefed by the guidebooks about ticket touts outside, and we knew we had to ignore them and go straight to the ticket counter.
We also knew from research that we wanted to buy the cheapest tickets, and that the touts would try and up-sell us and persuade us to get the VIP ringside seats. Me and my BF are very stubborn so I knew we would be able to ignore them.
The short version of this story is that despite being well-briefed, we too were susceptible to the insistent ticket touts who get in your face and confuse you. If not, skip the next couple of paragraphs. As we walked up we were accosted by men, predictably trying to sell us tickets and trying to upsell us. One of them was very insistent and said he worked for the stadium. The man offered to take us into the stadium, no strings attached, to see the seating for ourselves.
As we went in through the ticket barriers, I noticed him producing 2 ringside tickets to get us in. He showed us to very nice seats close to the ring. He went away and came back and charged us the cheaper price and let us stay in the ringside seats. But we were totally confused about what was going on, and it seemed to good to be true, so I was unable to relax as I thought he would come back to us and demand more money.
