2-21-08 Thailand: The last few weeks

Well, we're now on our way to New Zealand. I'm sitting in Bangkok right now at our hostel where we're staying for $6/night. It's an amazing place with travellers from Sumatra, Saudi Arabia, Greece, EVERYWHERE! We've managed to go the rest of the trip in Thailand with only one more sickness episode, but it was mostly Nath with a pained stomach while we rode the "2nd class bus" to Bangkok. We were on there with all locals and one Greek guy. The Greek and us were forced to the back. The bus would stop and pick up passangers and drop them off. Anytime the bus was full the bus worker would apologetically have a Thai local sit with us and move them as soon as there was room farther forward. Every time the Thai local looked like a deer in the headlights to have to sit with us white people. I felt like I was in the segregated south! It was pretty funny. We heard that sometimes people will hide in the luggage compartments of the buses and steal valuables from your backpack while it's driving so we carried all of our valuables on the bus. That meant that we had 4 bags with us on the bus due to the climbing gear. Luckily we had already ditched a rope in Tonsai for anchor replacement since most of the anchors consists of rope equalized between about 4 points tied to a huge steel ring. It's a pretty slick and replacable anchor system since a lot of the points are tie offs. Our rope was toast anyways due to all our climbing!

Speaking of which, I know some of you want to know about the climbing.... it's simply amazing! Beautiful pocketed faces, stalagtite stemming, huge roofs over the ocean where at high tide you remove your climbing shoes as you're being lowered into the water, tufa pinching, caving during spectacular multipitch, and more! I've pulled on monos, dynoed to stalagtites, and laybacked tufas. There are multipitches that overhang the whole way, caves through crags 400' tall so you can climb on one side in the morning, wander through with a headlamp, then climb the other side. Nothing is more than 40 minutes from "home" so you just head home in the middle of the day for more water, refresh by jumping in the ocean and grab some lunch before hitting the crags again. This place has it all for limestone! I wish we were a team of 3-4 sometimes to get more climbing shots. Instead, we have more scenery shots than anything else....

Being the motivated climber I am, we went crazy with the sends. Nath was climbing 6a (5.10b) when we arrived, and has since redpointed 7a+ (5.12a). We took few rest days, and have done up to 13 pitches in a day. Most people wake up late and are happy with 5 climbs, but we're up with the sun every day. It took me a while to get used to the rock here, but now I'm on an onsight rampage. I haven't gone for any project style climbs, but have just been ticking off climb after climb in the 5.12 range with onsights up to the 7b+ range (5.12c). I've completed almost every recommended single pitch climb in the entire guidebook through 7a+ (5.12a) and I think I've done about 150 pitches of climbing. Nath is probably at around 100 pitches, and has been onsighting up to 6c (5.11b). She improved her ability to crank on overhang and as of yesterday can now do 4 pullups! I can still only do 10..... :( A week or so ago I was up on Lord of the Thais, the well known amazing 7b multipitch for the redpoint, and on the Tonsai beach next to the bar I climbed all of the classic overhangs that Jess Downer recommended which are considered "bouldering with a rope." One day we even teamed up with our new friends from Arizona, Matt and Sarah, and climbed Humanality, a 5 pitch 6b+ (featherbag 11a) at night by headlamp! It was amazing since the bar below luminates the massive wall with a spotlight due to it's beautiful stalagtites, one of which you climb during the crux (hardest) pitch of the route. You climb up the wall until the holds disappear, and you look around for a while finding nothing wondering how to proceed up ward. Only when you look completely behind you and see the stalagtite do you realize that you have to climb with a hand and a foot on the main wall, and use opposition forces of a hand and a foot on the stalagtite. As you stem up the feature, you have hundreds of feet of air between your legs. It's a spectacular route to do at night, although I did get lost twice and have to reverse quite a bit of climbing as a result...

Our last day, I managed to pull off the improbable. I heard that The King and I (Lord of the Thais bigger brother) 7b+ (5.12c) was great and that the crux third pitch was crazy hard for the grade from some friends. It is also on the Thaiwand Wall next to Lord of the Thais, the beautiful wall that looms over all of Railay West. Nath wanted to do the first two pitches since there was a cave mid route that some Brits recommended to her and the climbing wasn't too difficult (she was nursing some injured fingers) Well, we headed up the first two pitches with a friend's rope to get down, and while we were sitting in the cave I decided to give the 5.12c pitch a go. I'd found countless bail biners already and could easily retreat from any point, and I had two ropes for the 40m sustained pitch looming above. I pulled out the roof with two ropes tied on and the insanity started instanly. I looked above at the pitch, which I couldn't see from the cave, and it was intimidating. It involved 30m of overhung climbing with an overhang of about 25'! I pulled through crux after crux until I started to tire. I saw the angle was starting to become less steep ahead and the holds bigger about 18m into the pitch, and the holds looked potentially bigger. This spurred me to make a desperate leap to a hold above with about 300' of air under me. Luckily, since the fall would have put me so far out in space I would have had trouble getting back on the wall I grabbed the hold for a beautifully dramatic finish to a beautifully difficult pitch. The climbing wasn't over, but it eased off toward the end that I just took my time for an amazing onsight. In atypical limestone fashion, the pitch even featured a 10m runout to the anchor past the lip of the overhang! Full value climbing.

We've made many friends already. Callum from Toronto, one of the friendliest guys we've met. He was kind enough to let us use his rope a few times for rapelling from multipitch, and let us use his belay device after I dropped mine into the jungle due to an unfortunate circumstance. He also went on his visa run with us. We met him on the white board in Tonsai looking for more people to do the full day trip to Malaysia in order to get a new 30 day visa for Thailand. It was a great trip, if for no other reason that we slept a lot in an air conditioned car on a much needed rest day.

Matt and Sarah, who we hung out with the most from Arizona. We did multipitch together, ate dinner together often, and just had a lot of fun with. Nath and Sarah had similar philosophies about saving money while travelling and both complained about how much Matt and I ate (although Matt can eat me under the table any day).

There were the Americans, Nate, Matt, Blake, and Chris with great American pride and upbeat personalities. They were great to climb with and fun to hang out with. Not only that, but due to amazing circumstances, Matt is now the only person I've ever met who has been shot in the head!

There were the Australians, from Melbourne who we are going to potentially visit and hopefully they'll cook for us since they're apparently both high end chefs.... :)

Last night we went do downtown Bangkok and rode the "sky train" and watched a crazy Thai movie. It was a bad kung-fu/kickboxing movie with subtitles. We paid a little bit more for a seat in one of the sofas in the back with a heated blanket. We had to stand for the tribute to the King (what a different culture!) and then the movie started. It was a bizarre story line that consisted of a high functioning autistic girl whose turned out to be a master of the martial arts. I started laughing when one of her toughest opponents was another autistic kid! We were looking for a non-american movie at the time we arrived and boy did we get one! Oh yeah, the theater was so big we got lost and had to ask for directions! Tavelling rules!

Now we're preparing for New Zealand. We're planning climbing, hiking, kayaking, and learning about the little things like tent protection from evil birds who while peck through your tent for kicks.... I have to go pack up to move our of our cool little hostel now. No more playing Chess with Nikos our Greek friend from the bus at night....

Josh and Nath