Kun Khmer Kickboxing

Tuesday and Thursday we visited the temples and I'll have a separate post just about that.  But after our first day at the temples, we thought it best to have a "rest day" (it's really fricking hot here and intense sweating for 6 hours will take it out of you!) so we spent Wednesday visiting more of Siem Reap.  Actually, first we slept in, then we ate a late breakfast, and THEN we wandered around Siem Reap. :-)

On Monday night we had met a few expats living here, one of whom started a Cambodian handicrafts business that pays good wages and provides education to their employees (http://cambolac.com/html/). Wednesday we found their shop to purchase a couple of souvenirs and did some more haggling in the markets.

One of the things that Buddy really wanted to do in Bangkok (had we spent time there) was to see a live Muay Thai match. Interestingly, it turns out that Cambodia has a very similar martial arts style called Kun Khmer AND they had a match on Wednesday in Siem Reap!  Our tuk-tuk driver, Tola, took us to buy tickets for the fights and he was so cool that we asked him to join us. He is a really nice man, and he said yes, but we aren't sure if he actually *wanted* to go or if he just said yes to be nice. Either way, it was really cool to hang out with him for the evening and loads of fun to watch the fights! Plus, since everything was in Khmer, he was really helpful in letting us know what the hell was going on.

With this style of fighting, there is this whole ritual that the fighters go through in the ring right before the match starts. It's a mixture of prayer, thanking their trainers, and some sweet dance moves. It's pretty fascinating! Here is a video I took of it (no fighting in this, it's just the warm-up prayer thing):

http://vimeo.com/98623965

You may have noticed the music in the background...throughout the fight, similar music plays and gets faster and faster with each round. It's really hypnotic and gets the crowd going, as well as the fighters. Plus the fighters kind of dance and hop to the beat! 

It was definitely a fun experience watching the Cambodian guys bet on the fights.  During one of the matches, all the betting guys got really pissed because it looked like one of the fighters was throwing the fight. We learned that it's pretty common for someone to pay one of the fighters to intentionally lose. The judges ended up calling that match a draw, which seemed like a pretty good solution and probably prevented a riot.

And when there was a really good match, the winning fighter would get tips from the crowd! There was one guy in particular who really killed it and everyone was whooping and cheering and throwing money at him. The whole evening was a lot of fun!!!