Off-The-Grid Muay Thai: The Hideaway Camp of Northern Thailand

Photos by Matthew Yarbrough

You step down from the truck and the trail reveals itself. It's been a while since you left Chiang Mai and any semblance of a city. Before you are the rolling mountains of northern Thailand and above you, somewhere on a nearby hill, is the Lanna Doi Modt Muay Thai hill camp. Doi Modt, "Ant Mountain," a fitting name for a peak inaccessible by cars, where you must haul your belongings on your back just as the ants do on the dirt trail below your feet.

Your guide tells you it's not much longer to the top. You pass fields of ferns—the area cash crop—while the rev of a few motorcycles struggling to climb steep paths echoes. It's hill tribe territory here, the mountains and valleys home to the Lahu people.

Up the mountain you climb, treated to increasingly impressive views, until you reach the wooden gate of the hill camp property. Then the dogs come out. A few run to greet you, some barking warily, most wagging their tail. They rush up to your guide and shower him with canine affection, and he calls them all by name.

And then come the puppies, maybe a dozen of them from distinct litters. They love you. They follow you around begging you to play with them. You can't stop smiling.

The sun is bright and softly warm. The earthen floor surrounding the Muay Thai ring is cool on your tired feet. Your host shows you to your thatched hut, made by local Lahu craftsmen, and brings you to a dinner table set with fragrant Thai soup and a fresh omelet atop a steaming bed of rice. The drinking water is from a local spring, not trucked in, not from plastic bottles.

At night you walk barefoot across your bamboo-thatched floor, settle into bed, and surround yourself with the mosquito net. You don't need the provided blankets, nor do you wish for a fan. The nighttime temperature is the most perfect you've ever experienced, and you fall asleep easily. When you wake up, it will be your first day training Muay Thai in this mountain hideaway.

It's been about 10 years since the first Muay Thai fighters came to train at Lanna Doi Modt. Run by Andy Thomson, a Scottish trainer and gym owner who first came to Thailand about 25 years ago, Lanna Doi Modt is dozens of miles from the nearest 7-11, big restaurant, or bar. It's near a village, but not in a village. The remoteness is why Andy Thomson built the camp there in the first place.

"I wanted to be away from electricity, live off the grid," Andy says. "I didn't want to be in a village because of the noise: dogs, chickens, pigs, even people are all very loud. I wanted to be in the jungle, but the logistics of that are very difficult. This is a nice balance between being completely in the jungle and being in a hill tribe village."

Andy was already running a gym at the time. Lanna Muay Thai, which he opened with his Thai common-law wife, Pom, in 1994 in the city of Chiang Mai, was well known in the region for training both Thai and foreign fighters. It was given the Thai name Kiat Busaba (Pride of Busaba) after Pom's real first name, Busaba. Andy dubbed it Lanna, the name of the old northern kingdom of Thailand. Plus, he reasoned the name "Lanna" was much easier for potential Western customers to pronounce.

Born in Canada to parents who took him all over the world as a boy, Andy says he's from Aberdeen, Scotland, but now calls Thailand his home. He first moved to Thailand in 1991, looking for refuge from grueling work on oil rigs in the Indian Ocean. Thailand was warm and relaxing, but Andy didn't commit to the country until he discovered Muay Thai. Andy was familiar with martial arts, having trained in taekwondo for years in Scotland. But Muay Thai felt different, and Andy knew he'd found his calling. With his savings from the oil industry, he and Pom successfully ran their own gym.

The couple had been operating Lanna in the city for about 10 years when a camp in the distant hills started becoming a reality. Doi Modt was a special project for Andy, who loved the mountains and wanted to live and train off the grid. Both Thai and foreign fighters from Lanna trekked to the gym in the hills for special camps. No clubs, no traffic, no city distractions. Just nature and Muay Thai.

Eventually, things changed between Andy and Pom. After nearly 20 years together, the couple split. Pom took Lanna, and Andy retreated to his beloved Doi Modt.

Lanna Doi Modt is a Muay Thai retreat, a haven in an area that could border on spiritual for some. But even Andy admits it's not suitable for everyone. It's best, of course, for nature lovers and adventurers. "People who don't mind living close to nature with the associated bugs," are the ones Andy says will do well here.

Indeed, the bugs can be ravenous. After two days at the camp, my legs were covered with itchy, swollen bites from insects I'd never encountered in other regions of Thailand. But one learns to adapt quickly; long pants and bug repellent might soon become part of one's hill camp arsenal.

The ideal Doi Modt student would need to be not only insect-tolerant but also devoted to Muay Thai. With no city amenities, there is little else to do in the area, other than hiking the local hills and enjoying the solitude and views of the nearby national park. "People who like to live close to nature, away from the cities, people who want to learn Muay Thai and understand it better, those are the kind of people who get on well here," says Andy.

Only a small number of students can train at the gym at any given time; there's simply not enough room to host more than eight or ten. But Andy doesn't like operating at full capacity. "[With a max of] four full-time fighters, [I can] still give them quality training without getting killed myself," Andy laughs. He is the only trainer, and provides one-on-one training to all his students.

Personal training is a big point of coming to Lanna Doi Modt, Andy says. "I've been doing this for 20-plus years and I could give a foreigner what most Thai trainers cannot because of language." However, Andy doesn't devalue Thai trainers or a Thai-style gym culture. He managed Lanna Muay Thai and employed Thai trainers for two decades, and he himself learned Muay Thai at Thai gyms. He views his Doi Modt hill camp as something of a stepping-stone into the Thai gym culture, openly encouraging his students to spend a few weeks or months at his camp, learn the basics, and then move on to a Thai gym.

"Here is a rarified world," he says of his hill camp. "Here is about personal training, about getting down basics, being efficient and effective, and developing strength and conditioning, training which will enhance but not take away from your Muay Thai."

Never a prolific fighter himself, Andy is nevertheless a natural teacher who has amassed a repertoire of drills taken from his years of training with Thais. Since leaving Lanna Gym in Chiang Mai and moving up to Doi Modt three years ago, Andy has maintained a regimented schedule of his own personal training, apparent in his lean physique and ability to clinch and spar with younger fighters who come through the camp.

Students come from around the world to train on this mountain. They find him through word-of-mouth, or remember him from his days at Lanna in Chiang Mai. Most students stay two weeks to a month. Andy's minimum requirement, though, is a weeklong stay. He drives hours to pick people haul in all the food. Hosting people in such a remote location is a big job. "Logistically, getting in food, bringing in people, it's not worth it for less than a week," he says.

After the dogs, one of the first things most new students notice about Lanna Doi Modt are the earthen floors around the ring. Andy takes great pride in his earthen floors, and will enthusiastically talk about the monumental task of leveling it. "You have to chop up the dirt to a fine powder and then turn it into a mud slurry and allow it to dry out and settle, and then you get yourself a flat floor," he says. There is still work to be done, he admits. "But the dirt floor here is part of what this place is. You ever heard of earthing? Walking on the earth in bare feet is supposed to be good for your health. Very good for your body, much nicer than concrete. If I open another gym elsewhere, I would take dirt from here and make a dirt floor there too."

Sprawling above the earthen floor and the canvas ring is a thatched roof that matches the surrounding guest huts. Local Lahu craftsmen constructed it. "They're brilliant," Andy exudes admiringly. "I designed this and they built it." He looks around the compound, points out various structures and tells their history. "The very first cabin they built for us was under the mango tree. In the space of one day, they built this cabin with only machetes. A little one-room cabin, but even the grass from the roof they cut from the land, and they made the ties to tie everything together from the bamboo, and all they had was a machete. It was phenomenal to watch them do it."

For Andy, life on the mountain is a constant struggle to keep the jungle at bay. When not training students, he's weeding the camp and hacking through encroaching vegetation, trying to keep the insects down. "The mosquitoes are coming back," he says. "And the sand flies."

His canines watch him work. The puppies play, running around the mountain on personal puppy adventures. Grown dogs laze around sunning themselves while Andy cuts through weeds beside them. Andy counts 28 dogs here now. "We use birth control on the girls, give them injections every six months," he says. "All the pups we've had recently are accidents." These are happy accidents for Andy, though. He treats each dog with kindness, gives them attention and loving pats. When visitors arrive, Andy's dogs reflect his attitude: welcoming and warm, excited to meet new people.

Students often chat with Andy for hours around the dinner table. "That is another point to the life here," he says of the rapport and friendship he builds with his new and returning students. "You can get another level of training here that you don't get at a regular Thai gym because [we] sit around and talk, and I'll share all my stories. Training is not just the physical. It is all about the mind. We share stuff, we talk through stuff, discuss stuff about Muay Thai."

Despite its remote location, Lanna Doi Modt often sees return visitors. Some students come back year after year, stuffing their belongings into backpacks and hauling their gear up the mountain path. The dogs fall over themselves in excitement at seeing old friends, and Andy reopens his home to them.

"I bring people into my life here," he says, surrounded by a half dozen dogs on benches alongside the wooden breakfast table. "It's one of the reasons, too, with Lanna [in Chiang Mai], that we had so many people come back year after year. It was because of the way we treated people." He rubs the pooch next to him behind her ear, and she gratefully licks his hand.