Rock Climbing and Getting Robbed...
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Krabi,
Thailand
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The Raileh beach area is an place full of extremes. It's a series of bays and penninsulas surrounded by sheer limestone cliffs and only accessible in two ways, one of which is by boat. The other way I'll mention a bit later. Also, everyone that you see here is super fit and not in the Kits Beach chotchy type of way either. Most of the people who come here are climbers and all of them seem to be in really good shape. The rest of the people here are travellers looking for a nice beach in a beautiful location, or people like Karl and I looking for a bit of beach and a bit of climbing as well...
So we spent our first couple of days just enjoying the scenery and chilling out on the beach and watching the crazy climbers do their thing. The second day I wound up going for a swim for five or ten minutes with my stuff in plain sight and when I got back my wallet along with Auntie Debit and Uncle Visa and 3000Baht ($100) in cash was all gone... :( Needless to say, it was a bit of a downer especially since I really had no other way to access money. I have to say though that the experience as a whole has turned out to be a positive one. I realized how amazing my parents are for helping me through the whole situation and arranging for replacement cards to be sent over here. Also, Karl's been a true champion about the whole situation and has been helping me out until I get my replacement cards. So all in all, it's just changed my perspective on things a little bit. After all, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been my passport or my camera with all the photos on it, or any other of a thousand things that could have gone wrong so far... Money is money, no big deal. So thank you, thank you, thank you to Mom, Dad and Karl for helping me through a bit of a hard time... But enough of the sappy stuff.
The next day Karl and a few people we met went on a kayaking trip around the bay and to some nearby islands while I took care of my situation. I also booked us into a 3-day climbing course where we would learn top-rope climbing, lead-climbing as well as multi-pitch climbing. The whole thing wound up being an amazing experience combined with being a bit of a terrifying one, at least for myself. I've always been a bit scared of heights, but being up 30m and leaning back off of a sheer rock face with nothing but jagged rocks below you and a thin piece of rope holding me up took things to a whole new level. I won't go into the details of multi-pitch climbing, but that aspect of things added to the fear as well. But, enough of all of the whole fear B.S. The whole "face your fears" things was one of the reasons I wanted to take the course. Mission Accomplished...
The day we finished we sat down on the beach for a couple of hours around sunset and just watched the really hard-core climbers do the really short / extremely difficult climbing routes. Our instructor went on a couple of these routes and he was like a monkey up there. He was a little Thai guy named Sami who probably weighed about 115 pounds and about 5 foot 3. But when he was up there he could twist himself around upside down, sideways, inside-out, you name it and he did it all effortlessly. As we were watching him strut his stuff on the rocks, we found out the second way to access the beach we were on. All of a sudden we look up to the top of the rock face about two or three hundred metres up and we see some dude launch himself off of the cliff, fall for about 2 seconds or until he was about halfway down the cliff and then open up a parachute about a second before splattering himself on the ground. Then about 20 seconds later another guy did the same thing, landing about 20m away from us... Definitely a pretty cool thing to see. Apparently these guys come to this beach every year and stay for about a month. Then a few minutes after that we saw this couple do some crazy cirque-du-soleil type of stuff. The guy would hold up the girl and she would be doing handstands on his raised up feet and other crazy stuff like that. He didn't put her down for about 20 minutes either... Oh yeah, and earlier that day we some probably the craziest thing of all. We see this one guy climbing a route right next to where we were climbing and we notice that he's going up with some rope, but he's not clipping into any of the bolts. We watch him for a while and he winds up free-climbing the whole way up (easily 100-150m). If he had slipped and fallen at any point, there isn't even any question that a quick and gruesome death would ensue. Complete nutcase. Again, a really extreme place.
All in all, our 7 or 8 days staying on Tonsai Beach (just next to Raileh) were really great. A nice break from the party scene of Koh Phangan. Getting our climbing done was also a really great experience and we got to hang out with some really great people that we've met who know who they are. And getting robbed... Well, it sucked, but as i said earlier it opened my eyes up a whole lot so no regrets. In the words of Bobby McFarrin, "Don't worry, be happy."
Stay tuned for more from the most beautiful place I've ever seen (other than Buchanan Tower)... Koh Phi Phi...
PS - Congratulations to all the NIBS on a succesful I-Week.
