where cider meets condensed milk: Rock climbing in paradise...

where cider meets condensed milk

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Rock climbing in paradise...

April and I ended our vacation on Railay, in Krabi province. The beaches are only accessible from Krabi town by boat, and there are so many resorts packed onto the small landmass that even really crummy rooms cost way beyond what they're worth. Railay is good for rock-climbing, so we spent the afternoon doing a beginner's course, placed in a group with 2 people that (predictably enough) turned out to be JETs as well. It was so busy, with so many people competing for space at the wall, that we only got 3 or 4 climbs in over the course of 4 hours. Our guides were hilarious young Thai guys, all short and tanned and impossibly ripped, and we had a really fun afternoon. April is a rockstar, and skittered up all the climbs in no time flat, whereas a scary slip on one tough section caused a bit of a panic situation for me, and I had to talk myself into going up the next one. Even when you know you're perfectly safe, it's hard to calm yourself down and override your body's "You are about to die, fool!" adrenaline response.

Many climbers, little bitty climbing space.

April mountain-goating up to the top.

A friendly soccer game on the beach, played by many of the local guys who work here.

This is the sunset from West Railay beach-- a gorgeous wide beach with classy bungalow resorts all along the expanse of sand. The beachside restaurants were uniformly mediocre, with non-existent service, but at least the view is pretty.

We stayed on East Railay (above), where the backpacker level of lodging is. (Ours cost $25-- a lot for Thailand-- and though there were no bugs, we inexplicably had salty water coming from the taps.) Coming into East Railay at high tide, you sail through trees and bushes rising up out of the murky blue water that form the mangrove swamps. It's rather pretty, but as the tide goes out, the entire bay turns into a mud flat, with debris and trash embedded into tree roots. I had to wade through the knee-deep muddy tide for about 100 yards to catch a boat in the morning, and nearly slipped while wearing my pack, if not for some random Italian man there to catch me. (God bless those Italians...)

We had planned on meeting up with our friends from Vancouver again here, but got an email from Fred saying that they had spent the day in a Phuket hospital after their climbing friend had fallen 7 metres off the wall and landed on a large rock. The guy was lead climbing, and was inches from the first clip when his foot slipped. Fred said every person on the wall froze as the guy fell 20 feet straight down. If I had heard this story earlier, I would not have even gone up on one climb. The guy works for the United Nations, so had the connections and money to find good doctors. He will probably be fine, though has some cracked ribs, and they were concerned about a punctured lung. Could have been much worse! After hanging around the hospital for a day, Jesse left from Phuket and headed north, so we didn't see him again, but Fred came back to Railay that night to stay in the UN guy's posh bungalow and climb some more, so the three of us went out.

This is a sketch joint called "The Last Bar" that promised a fire show and snakes, though we also got to see some completely crap Thai boxing. The real thing is an elaborate and intense display of physicality, but they probably just pulled these guys out from bartending duties to entertain bored foreigners. Fred has been doing karate for 20-something years, and spent the last week of his trip at a hard-core Muay Thai boxing camp in Phuket, which he said was kicking his ass. This performance was just child's play, apparently. (Not that I can compare it to anything I've actually seen...)

Here's the snake show. The highlight of every set was when the guy would end up with one ore more snakes in his mouth.

Tempting the cobra... before he puts it in his mouth.

I instructed Fred and April to look frightened-- Oh no!! Terrifying snakes!! About to go into that guy's mouth!!-- but they clearly didn't follow directions. I see no fear. We were all a bit underwhelmed by the show.

An expensive little bungalow resort, good enough for the UN guy. As we were leaving the Last Chance Saloon/Snake Snogging Bar of Wonder, Fred ran into a bunch of the crazy Thai rock climbing guides he was friends with, and stayed out all night with them. And thus was still intoxicated when April and I showed up to steal his breakfast buffet tickets in the morning. (Our bungalow only had saltwater showers on the menu.)

I had to go back to Phuket to catch my flight, and ended up again on Patong while I wasted 5 hours. Shopping is too expensive there, and Patong is more depressing and dingy by daylight than in neon glow, so I found sanctuary in a beauty salon and paid for girly things I don't often bother with, like a mani-pedi and massage and hair wash/cut/style. I don't know how to tell the legit massage parlors from the bad ones, but this one had a man getting a massage in the light of the main room, with plenty of windows, and they said they always sanitized the nail clippers for manicures, so I took a chance. The guy getting the massage was a friendly teacher from Estonia (my first Estonian person!) who wouldn't stop talking to me the entire time. It's hard enough to enjoy a massage from a complete stranger when you have some guy from the Baltic quizzing you on English grammar points. (Is differentiative a word? Differentialize? Do I know or care?) (Answer: No, I didn't know, because my brain cells commit ritual suicide every successive day I spend living in Japan. Though maybe I did care, because I'm a big dork, and I looked up the words when I got back home.) I had to take a taxi alone to the airport when the minibus was full-up, and my driver was a very kind man with the ugliest circa 1984 mullet I've seen in awhile. At one point, we pulled up to a stoplight, and I looked over to see a family of 5 stacked tightly on one motorbike. Meanwhile, I sat windblown and relaxed in the back of my chartered taxi truck. Felt rather unresourceful at that moment. The Phuket airport was a madhouse, chock-full of awkward Japanese tourists and sunburned Germans, and I was relieved to finally board a plane that would help get me home to Nippon. Good-bye, Thailand....

posted by Raychaa @ 4:46 PM

2 comments:

At 3:08 AM, Anonymous said…

Rachel...April and I (Fred) were not showing any fear around the snakes because we are EVIL...can't you see it in the redness of our eyes in the picture...LOL
At 10:38 AM, Anonymous said…

Hey Rachel! It's Happy Kathy from GoMAD.....Nice Pics! I think I wanna do the rock climbing next time around! Looked like a lot of fun!!