The virtues: Courage

Whatever it is that it takes to climb 20 meters up a cliff, then turn around and jump off into the ocean, I think it looks close enough to courage to call it that.

The cast of characters

The Austrians

I took up with a crew of Austrians for a while, a posse of over 10 guys who drink hard and climb harder. Listening to them carry on in their accented German night after night and participating only in a few side conversations in English was an enjoyable way to pass time in company without having to fret too much about carrying on with small talk. But by the end of the week, bits of their sentences were starting to translate in my brain, if only in imaginary ways. I understood meaning, if not syntax, and would sometimes respond in English to a question asked in German. The myth of magically-acquired language.


They were noisy, and laughed hard and loudly, and laughing always translates. It’s not hard to be infected by it, even if you missed the joke.

When they left, it felt as if the Freedom Bar and the beach were empty.


The Germans

I was trolling for partners a Pyramid Bar over a late breakfast when Felicks and Marlene came in, having their own late breakfast before heading out for an afternoon climbing. They started asking questions, “Are you traveling alone?” “Is that hard?” “Is it hard to find partners?”


“Somedays, yes, it’s hard to find partners,” I admitted. “Like today…” I easily secured an invite to join them climbing.

The Austrians climb stuff I can only imagine someday completing, but Felicks and Marlene climb right at my level. I paired up with them, we added Angelo (Italian), Eddie (American), and Natalie (Canadian) and had a full posse on the rocks for a few days. Felicks wanted a long, full day, so we headed to Fire Wall in the morning, for full sun, full heat, full humidity. We’d run out, climb and belay, and then come back and hover in the shade, gulping water and talking about how boring it would be to wait for shade to climb. By afternoon, the sun moved behind the cliffs and the climbs were in the shade, we were so sweat-soaked and tired we headed for barbequed chicken and Chang beer.

When I said I was taking off, Felicks replied, “But you’ll be breaking up our little… What do you call a group of cows?”

“A herd?” I said.

“Yes, you’ll break up our herd,” he said.


The perpetual ex-patriot

I thought I was a wandering soul, until I met Camila. She left her home in Brazil at 17, to live on different continents, learning other languages and chasing dreams and all those other things women chase across countries. It was her guidance that took me away from Ton Sai for a few days, into the unknown, and her enticement, “You want to share my motorbike?” that got me out of bed and all the way down to the ice cream shop when I was sick with a cold and unwilling to stray far from my bungalow. She’s so well-known on that little island that she can’t walk down the street without getting sucked into a conversation, and at that shop the woman working the counter knew how long it had been since she’d last stopped in for a fix of pistachio ice cream.

In Italy, Germany, Brazil, or California, I’d want her to be my tour guide.


The Italians

Everything Angelo says sounds vaguely romantic.

“I would bring everything for you,” he said when I scrambled back up to the base of a route to retrieve my shoes and water bottle.

“I will do this for you,” he said when he wasn’t sure I was going to finish a climb.

The simplest of phrases, in translation, border on accidental seduction.

He runs on his own schedule, and though he’s recently relocated to Ton Sai, still occasionally takes nights back in Ao Nang, where he was staying to participate in a bit of the night life. A Thai disco? I never. Angelo always. He often shows up to climb sometime in early afternoon, grumbling of little sleep.

With Leonardo, the language is a different matter altogether and so is the schedule. Joe (a Swedish climbing partner Leo met in Laos and bumped into again in Ton Sai) had stopped to talk to some friends while we were on the way to meet Angelo, and Leo was urging us onward.

“Just wait a minute,” Joe said.

“I’ll wait a minute when I have a minute to wait,” Leo said, and took off.

I had been climbing with them for a few days, and will admit I’d noticed Leo’s propensity for cutting corners and bending rules when it comes to climbing safety, before I heard a story from another climber who had been near Leo and Joe when they first arrived. They were hauling their rope in a jacket (not a bag, not coiled, just stacked and bundled around in jacket) and a group of four of them was climbing with one pair of climbing shoes. Leo had four quickdraws with him, and so would climb high enough to clip those four quickdraws into four bolts, and then lower back down and clean the bottom three to climb on with them. The responses I get from other climbers when I retell this story vary from “Great idea in an area where the bolts are suspect.” to “Well, that’s dedication.”

They belay me with a Grigri, an automatically locking belay device, which eases a few of my worries but also leaves me wondering just how little attention they’re paying when they take phone calls while someone is climbing.


The Americans

When I left Ton Sai, part of going where I was headed was to meet up with Josh. We’d shared bloody marys and lunch in Boulder and talked about his work and his experiences climbing in Ton Sai over the last 10 years. He’d given me the loosest directions on how to get in touch with him in Thailand, which ended in “There’s a party for Tom’s birthday and a showing of my film on Saturday night. You should be there, if you can get there.” No address. No phone number. No time. But, I showed up on the island, and immediately heard rumors of a party, and traced it to the bar next to my bungalow. So, I went.

Josh was deep in conversation, so I stood back a bit, waiting, until his gaze flickered over me, he paused, turned back and, grinning, hugged me.

“It’s like, I just say, yeah, OK, I’ll be on the other side of the planet, too, and here you are,” he said.

The next morning, I found myself in a boat headed out to the cliffs that was full of people who know people I know. >Enter, the Americans. They have become my companions of late, when I’m not preoccupied with the Italians.

Jace, eight days younger than me and, like me, a walking mess of contradictions, has become my roommate. We do, in fact, stay up late giggling, doing one another’s hair and discussing our crushes back home. And on a good night, the books we’ve read, the places we’re going, and life, the nature of the universe and everything else. Matty and Brendan are the latest members in Tom Cecil’s orchestra (in the guide book by Sam Lightner, Jr., many of the routes with Tom Cecil’s name include references to “his orchestra,” his crew of guides who work summers with him at Seneca Rocks in West Virginia and come to Thailand for part of the winter off-season). Clint and Apple are in the crowd too, but I’ll leave off scrutiny of them for later.

We slide tables together at the restaurant count how many beers into the night we are, discuss dinner, discuss climbing, discuss how many bhat we’ve spent and how many we have left to go. It’s an ideal ring of climbing bums and honestly, I feel privileged to have been adopted.

Ton Sai! Ton Sai!

After a week of the quiet of another town, the texture of Ton Sai is… well, we’ll call it an abrasive familiarity.

“It’s so easy to hate on Ton Sai,” Josh said. It’s true. I got out of town and started ragging on it immediately, even my beloved little bungalow. But I came back this weekend, and on the long tail from Ao Nang, as we rounded the Ao Nang Tower and the cliffs surrounding Ton Sai came into view, their reds and yellows in full glow of the afternoon sun, I was delighted at the sight of it.

Ton Sai functions like any small town, in some ways. As a small town, all I have to do is walk down the street to see someone I know.

That main street—the only street through town, is a horseshoe-shaped and begins and ends on the beach. The first leg of it is paved in cement, with deep gutters on either side. Then the pavement quits and rutted dirt begins. Walking through town after a hard and long rain is like walking over a skim of chocolate pudding. The road is only ever driven by a handful of vehicles, mostly motorbikes, some with sidecars like crates, and three trucks, a white Toyota, a black Mazda, and a thing more dune buggy than truck that looks like it came in a box labeled “some assembly required.” These vehicles haul jugs of water in—the bottled water for the tourists—and trash out to the boats. The trash that isn’t burned in the jungle at the center of the horseshoe, anyway. I’ve maintained just a dim hope that at some point they’ll pick up the heaps of plastic bottles scattered around town and that they’ll end up recycled, not at the source of the black smoke of the trash fire that burns several times a week. They do diligently retrieve bottles from the trash, so there’s that to consider.

The reception areas for the bungalows and the restaurants that accompany them line the street. The restaurants are all open air, bare boards or concrete and wood tables that collect the leaves when the breeze blows. The only places closed off by four walls and scrubbed thoroughly clean are the handful of convenience stores (where the travelers go to buy the water the trucks haul in). They occasionally stock some fresh fruit—bananas, oranges, mangoes, and the occasional apple—up front, but mostly, what they sell is wrapped tightly and sealed: crackers, cookies, and candy bars. Two stands make pancakes on the street, and they’re as good as IHOP at being open all night. The massage parlors advertise the same—“Open all the time” the one next to Mr. Pancake says on a sign below the services and rates offered (200 bhat or about $7 for a 60 minute Thai massage). Any worry that “all the time” is code for “whatever, whenever” is dispelled by the fact that, like the restaurants, the massage parlors are open air.


Down the road (if you view where the boats down on the horseshoe as up the road), is the food alley or the street kitchens. Chicken Mama’s Rendezvous competes with the other Chicken Lady to sell cheap fried noodles, fried rice, curry and, of course, barbequed chicken. Neither place is fast. Or likely to get your order exactly right 10 out of 10 times. A loaf of their banana bread makes an excellent midday climber’s snack. Bananas or mangoes or half a pineapple are also available for purchase. Bananas sell for 5 bhat, or about 18 cents.

Chicken Mama’s is staffed by the same people almost every day, including a teenage girl who is absolutely fearless at the grill (I saw her on the boat back, and she got on at an island that has a large muay thai [martial arts] training camp and I heard has produced the last two muay thai champions for Thailand). The Freedom Bar, the Sawasdee Bar, the Sunset Bar and the fish restaurant on the corner are also run by the same people every day. The Chicken Lady, Chicken Mama’s rival, didn’t show up to work one day and so her street kitchen stayed closed.

Having the same people in the same shops makes it easy to become a familiar face, particularly given the tendency here to pick favorites and frequent those places. I get friendly waves from the staff at Freedom, Sunset, and Sawasdee bars, and I’d hardly be said to drink my nights away.

The bar seating is platforms with low side tables and woven mats and pillows to sit on. I fidgeted all the first night figuring out how to make use of these accoutrements, including a triangular pillow designed, I suppose, for reclining and watching the climbers and, of course, the sunset, which is the real show in town. Twilight shakes climbers from the cliffs and they cluster at the bars along the beach for a Chang or Singha beer, or perhaps coconut water, served by shearing the sides and bottom of the coconut to create level surfaces and chopping open the top to make a lid, through which you place your straw and sip. The sun sets just beyond the Point, and as it is going down the water turns from teal to a silver lavender blue, more iridescent than clear.


Then, cold showers and a change of clothes and, eventually, dinner. A dinner order is a gamble. Service, even at the same place from one night to the next, is spotty and variable. It’s all part of the adventure.

The rain tonight brought out the frogs and toads. One dodged my footsteps as I walked toward my bungalow. They’re filling the night with their “come hither” croaks, which sound like cellos tuning a very low string and someone quickly beating a wooden block.

I’m back at the Andaman Nature Resort for my bungalow, but up a different path and, because all the cheap places are booked, with a roommate in a place with two twin beds. Two beds, one mosquito net. The bungalow is directly behind the restaurant, which basically means I’m hungry all the time. It’s also near the lodging for some of the people who work here, one of whom has a baby. The sounds of the restaurant and the baby crying provide an odd sort of comfort in background noise. It’s interesting to see my trip changing shape in these next weeks, my quiet, private life replaced by a roommate and a lot of residual noise and accompanying smells.

At the beach, the boatmen hover and advertise the places they'd like to take you. When I'm on Railey Beach for a climb on that side of the peninsula, my gear always gives me away. "Ton Sai! Ton Sai!" they call. I hike the trail back instead.

Secrets

I can’t tell you where I am, only that it is where I have always wanted to be. It is a town on the edge of its end, still predominantly local, still crowded with the faces of people who may never live anywhere else, may rarely even see anywhere else. But just developed enough for a traveler to have easy access to all that she needs. To put the name in writing, to contribute publicly to the inevitable discovery of this place, would leave me sleepless at night. But I’ll tell you all about it, and you’ll know it when you’ve found this place, or one like it.

This island is gloriously anachronistic, ripe with perfect combinations of things that look like they should never have been put together. Teenage girls in Muslim headscarves, sometimes stacked three deep, rip around on their motorbikes. Adidas-imitation track jackets are hung out to dry on palm fronts. Emimen’s rap music emanates from a bungalow just big enough for a thin, twin mattress—and cargo pants are on top of a stack of laundry hung over the windowsill, so local moms must tell local teens “Clean up your bungalow or no dinner tonight.” The family’s brood of chickens wander the yards and cross the roads freely, and cats, who look a few genes closer to lions, their noses flat and golden eyes wideset, roam over porches and under the stilts houses are raised on. They sleep everywhere.



We came over on Saturday by boat, the only boat connecting our peninsula to this island and one of few that would dock at the long pier here all day. The taxi driver spoke little English, pulled out a map of the places tourists usually stay and waited for us to point.

“Where do the climbers go?” Stephanie asked. He pointed. We boarded. His taxi was a truck with benches down the bed and a canopy over its top. He drove a coastal road that cut through a small village and then up past the beach, past little coffee houses, a dive shop, a yoga retreat, and then he stopped. It took a bit more fumbling and one call to Camila, whose advice it had been to come here, to actually get pointed in the right direction, which was to Danny’s place.

When followed a sign up a dirt road carpeted with pine needles, and man jumped up from hammock on a porch crowded with hammocks, and walked through a fleet of motorbikes to greet us.

“We’re looking for Danny,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” he said. Like, of course you are.

“Are you Danny?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “You need a bungalow? I have two bungalows.”

We were lucky. His last two. He walked us by the hammocks, where two women, other tourists were lounging like lounging was their permanent business, and into a garden circled by bungalows. He directed me up a porch almost buried in greenery and onto the broad, wood planks (and nearly all of them seal together) of a bungalow. It’s maple wood shutters were closed, but enough light came in from the midday sun to see the bed, a desk, and the fresh towels and blanket at the foot of the bed, and then through to the bathroom, which has a larger countertop than any apartment I’ve rented in the last five years and it looks to be granite. The floor is covered in these smooth white stones and the stairs down and the shower tiled in large, dark gray tiles. There’s a real showerhead. It was luxurious, and barely more than what I’d been paying in Ton Sai. Of course, I took it.

With the front door open, I can see into the garden, a riot of orange, yellow, pink and white flowers. I can guess at the names of some of them—I know the lotus, and think I recognize plumeria. But the others are lost on me. Once I’d set my bags down and wandered back to where Danny was again swinging in his hammock, I said, “Danny, I may never leave.”

He seemed all right with that.

Tourism hasn’t taken over dominance yet, so there’s still industry here—rubber farms. The rubber trees are planted in fanatically straight rows, and each has a feather-shaped carving in it to loosen the sap, which drips into a small black cup at its base. I walked along a dirt road far enough into a rubber farm to see a man hanging the sheets of rubber out to dry and to smell it seeping fresh from the trees, where the smell we know later as having turned acrid is still sweet.

There’s a small community of travelers, many of them repeat visitors. They’ve been here before, they know one another and knew where to stay when they arrived. To know to come—particularly to know to come to go rock climbing, you would have to know someone who knows someone, and someone would likely know the couple who runs the rock climbing shop in town. They coordinate the boats out to the crags, and yes, many of them are only accessible by boat and the handful of others by motorbike.

To know about this place, a person would have had to scrounge through the guidebook and take only the barest of hints that there was something here worth seeing. And let that be a lesson in finding where you’d like your next stop to be while traveling. Of course, it’s a gamble. They may not all have stretches of white beaches you can walk to from your bungalow, or an island that’s accessible at low tide but nearly flooded over at high tide. If it’s not too high, it only appears that people are walking on water as they walk over the mirrored surface toward the island.



If I were that kind of travel writer, I would leap at the chance to write about this place. It’s poised on the edge of becoming a hot destination for those hordes of tourists looking for an authentic experience, but then it would have hordes of tourists and not much of an authentic experience. I wouldn’t want any responsibility in that.

And where would I go the next time I wanted to come to Thailand? I’ve already written to my mother to say I’ll bring her here.

The virtues: Perseverance

I crowded into Tom’s table at dinner one night when Chicken Mama’s Rendezvous was quite busy, and he was talking about his project. In answering rapid-fire questions from his friends, he happened to run together the responses to “What’s the climb called?” and his comment on his project. “It’s ‘Sex Power,’” he said. “I don’t have it.”

In climbing, a “project” is a route a climber repeatedly attempts to successfully or cleanly complete. The climber ropes up and gets on the climb 10 or 20 or 40 times, only to fall off when attempting a series of moves or one move in particular. A project pushes the climber’s limits. It’s often above the grade a climber typically leads or links a series of particularly strenuous moves. It’s a challenge and it’s a way to grow as a climber. (A project also often applies to attempting a route never before completed, though that’s not the kind of project Tom was talking about.)

“Sex Power” is rated 8a in the French grading system, which is the one employed in Thailand. That roughly translates to 5.13b in the Yosemite Decimal System used in America. The territory of most mortal climbers is usually somewhere around 5.10 or 5.11. It’s on the Ton Sai roof, which is bountiful territory for projects. The routes are steeply overhung and often technical, with complicated and occasionally acrobatic maneuvers.

Tom, a joiner (yes, like Snug in Midsummer Night’s Dream), from Tyrol, Austria, said he stopped counting after 10 attempts at the route, but estimated he’d tried it between 10 and 50 times. He agreed to let me film him working his project as an example of perseverance.



Click here to see the video.

Same same. Different different.

Here, in a strange country with a life entirely displaced from my ordinary routines, I’ve become a regular.

I walk into the Pyramid Café each morning, and the Thai guy who runs the cafe calls from behind the counter, “Same same?”



It’s the same kind of repetition heard from the boatmen, who twice call out the destinations they’d like to drive you or guess you might be going. “Tonsai Tonsai?” “Ao Nang Ao Nang?”

Instead of shaking my head at him off like I do the boatmen, I nod, kick my shoes off, and take my seat on the broad platform by the road. The reading happens at the two-seater tables at the back; the socializing happens up front. And I say “platform” because that’s what most of the restaurants here have for seating: platforms strewn with pillows and woven mats. Shoes are banned from the platforms. There are more rules here for having your shoes off than having shoes on.

I sit chatting with other regulars long after my coffee and muesli have come and gone. The talk is mostly of climbing, but we tread into other territory sometimes. My list of coveted climbing destinations is growing: Switzerland, Greece, Sweden, Squamish. Not to mention, of course, the legends I’m hearing about climbs here. I’m also exposed to different approaches for climbing, like people who take one “rest day” for every two they spend climbing, meaning one in every three days is spent lounging around on the beach, doing a bit of yoga and reading. Rest days are a foreign concept to me but I’ve finally conceded to taking something that resembles them, and every few days, limiting myself to just one route or some bouldering and matching it with swimming and yoga and yes, a bit of reading on the beach, and perhaps shooting some photos or video... Right. “Rest” day. I don’t even linger that long over breakfast, though I know they wouldn’t throw me out. I’m a regular, after all.

In Denver, the waitstaff at the café I have frequented for three years merely blink in a manner that suggests familiarity. They never try to guess at my order or so much as say hello in a way that confidently indicates they know they’ve seen me before, even if I was in there earlier in the week and had the same waitress. It’s the perfect isolation of strangers that, perhaps, is necessary to survive in a city where you’re actually rarely alone and when you are “alone” it means in your apartment, which is stacked on other apartments full of other people laboring under the impression that they are also alone. The comfort of routines is forgiven by people who perpetually pretend they don’t know that you’ll be in for coffee twice this week and at least once for the biscuits and gravy—and maybe that’s the safety net, because if that many people knew admitted they your business, and had some idea for how often you’d be in to buy a cinnamon roll, well, how would we cling to that glorious autonomy of solitude?

Somehow, nothing beats “Same same?” when your life is different different.

I'll do my climbing in the rain

I was belaying Aaron up a climb Wednesday afternoon when the wind started to pick up. At first we thought, “Oh what a nice breeze.”

We’d been climbing all day at a crag that has jungle running up to the edge of it and over the top of it, so close that sometimes lowering off a route meant lowering into the trees. The mosquitoes were fierce and the ants tenacious enough to crack even the most dedicated of backpack zippers. I’d been climbing routes I’d usually use crack technique on, bracing a palm on one side of the rock and a shoulder or elbow on the other, but mix sweaty, sunscreen-coated skin with limestone in humid air and I might as well have buttered my limbs before every attempt at moving upward. I mean that in the best of humor. I was climbing strong and had partnered up for the morning with Sunny. At every foot placement and finger grip I could hear him saying, “Uh huh, uh huh,” the vowel-sounds twinged with his Australian accent—and I’ve decided accents makes all positive reinforcement more effective.

The wall had been mostly quiet when we arrived. The tide was in and to get to this cliff with the tide high, you either have to swim or take a boat. We’d hired a boat and then hiked through the jungle, among towering palm trees whose fronds are as long as a kayak.

Aaron was leading what we’d expected to be the last climb of the day when the wind started to pick up. (For the non-climbers: in lead climbing, a climber ties his harness to a rope that’s attached to the harness of his belayer through a belay device, which basically employs the physics of a pulley system to allow me to easily stop his fall. Then he clips quickdraws [two carabiners connected by a piece of flat, nylon rope] into bolts placed about 10 feet apart from one another in the rock and clips the rope into those quickdraws. Were he to fall while climbing, he would fall as far as that last quickdraw and I would catch him using my belay device.) He was more than half way up, but really, the first bolt on this climb set a point of no return. If he wanted to take home all his gear with him, then he had to finish the climb, regardless of the weather.

And that weather pretty quickly turned from a “nice breeze” to a steadily increasing wind. Leaves were swept off the cliff above us and rained down onto the jungle around us and the wind blew hard enough to loosen some of those palm fronds and one came crashing down into the jungle behind us. In a matter of seconds, the light went from an overcast day to the dark of twilight. I could see the rain across the treetops; it looked as though there would be one hard, silver line between being dry and being drenched, and it was moving toward us with the certainty of a steamroller. Stephanie and I discussed whether he should clean the route as I lowered him, but the route meandered, making it tougher to clean on the way down than the way up… and, of course, I do like a challenge.

So I agreed to follow and clean the route, meaning he anchored the rope at the top of the climb and I climbed the route after him, removing the quickdraws he’d left behind as I made my way up the route. An overhang at the top of the cliff had kept the rock fairly well sheltered from the rain, so the rock was only damp in a few spots, and that breeze dropped the temperature toward something quite pleasant. It might have been my favorite route of the five we did that day.

We hovered in a cave with a group of other climbers, waiting to see if the storm would roll over the top of us and move on, and then conceded to hiking back in the rain. The tide had gone far enough out that we could meander along the shoreline. Usually, while heading back to Ton Sai, we get soaked from the bottom up, wading through water. This time, it was soaked from the top down, rained on and cooled off while watching mist and clouds move over the dark green hillsides behind Ton Sai.

(And I'd have photos to show you, but I just accidentally deleted them. I was sure I'd saved them to my laptop, but they are no where to be found. More visuals soon, I promise!)

Planes, buses and longtail boats

From Bangkok, I took an Air Asia flight to Krabi, on the southwestern peninsula of Thailand. And there, I boarded a shuttle bus to Ao Nang. It wound past open-air schools and a few resorts, through crowded main streets of towns where the upper stories seem to lean in on the lower levels. Thai motorcyclists and pedestrians are either fearless or psychic. They ducked around the bus at the last possible moments, escaping death by mere inches.



We pulled squeezed by an open-air market at the seashore of Ao Nang, close enough to the vendors I could look out the window and try to guess at what food items they had skewered, roasted and were selling. Racks of clothes were marked for 20b or 30b, just about on American dollar, but looked like the dregs or the dregs of Goodwill. Fisherman’s pants cost closer to 150b.

From Ao Nang, or anywhere else, really, the only way to get to Ton Sai is by longtail boat. And even at low tide, the only way to get to the boat is to wade through the waves. I was thigh-deep in water when I passed my luggage to the boatman and boarded with my jeans thoroughly soaked. This shared lament over our sopping pants—that we’d bothered to cuff them up at all seemed ridiculous—was how I met Stephanie and Aaron, two climbers from San Francisco.



Our packed boat cruised around cliffs where kayakers paddled among the limestone outcroppings and the occasional dangling rope marked a free soloing spot, a place to climb, unroped, and let the water break your fall. We were deposited at Ton Sai in much shallower water (it’s only taken three days for my jeans to dry—yes, jeans, I know, but I get cold on airplanes and let’s recall that that was where this journey started), and hiked up a road that’s paved for about a quarter of its horseshoe-shape. Then it fades into uneven dirt.

My bungalow, at 300b, is priced as low as they go in high season, unless you’re willing to forego a fan, an electric outlet, and walls solid enough to keep monkeys out. I’m not willing, somehow, to go much lower than an only mostly-sealed building (seriously, my tent in the Bahamas offered more security from insect and reptilian invaders). The cracks in the floorboards are, I’m sure, fat enough to accommodate a tarantula and if there aren’t centipedes crawling through my ceiling, plotting aerial attacks, it’s by their choice and not by any defense established by the building. The shower is a hose spigot, and the toilet “flushes” by pouring water into the bowl, which is collected in a bucket under the sink because there’s no plumbing between the sink drain and the drain in the floor. And roughly $10 a night does not include hot water, toilet paper, hand soap, anywhere to store clothes or gear but in my bags and under my bed, or electricity between 7:30am and 5pm. Most of the town has no electricity during the day, when the generators are off.



And basically, I think it’s amazing what you can get used to.

Stephanie spent five months on the Phra Nang peninsula over last winter, and was more than happy to point out the necessaries: where to buy water by the five-gallon jug instead of by the liter, where to get a real cup of coffee and not Nescafe instant, which street vendors will add mango to their Thai pancakes, and which electrolytes to add to the water otherwise so stripped of its minerals by the Thai filtration process it’s basically allegedly useless—yes, even the filtered water has to be treated. (I’m trying to alternate buying their filtered water and using my own so I don’t use all 1,000 gallons before India. Don’t worry, Dad. It will see plenty of use.) She’s also coached me a bit on my Thai, so I can say “Hello” and “How are you?” and “I am good.” Oh, and held my hand the first time I stepped up on a slackline. So she’s been pretty well indispensable.



It’s easily 85 or 90 degrees in the sun every day, and the humidity is thick enough to feel like a perpetual steam bath. The first day out, Stephanie, Aaron and I visited the Thaiwand wall, which was gloriously shady and had an excellent breeze all day. Every climb tops out above the trees with a view onto Railay Bay. We spent a day at a sunny crag, climbing routes half-hidden in the enormous caves and getting gloriously dirty. Then today, climbed at a cliff you have to take a boat to get to when the tide is high. It was pouring rain when we hiked back along the beach, the tide far enough out to leave just damp rocks and sand to cross.



We come down from climbs soaked with sweat and have sunburned just in the reflection off the water or the few minutes spent walking to the climbs. At the end of the day, fully clothed, we go straight into the ocean, which is only just cool enough to make a difference. And yes, that cold water shower is plenty welcome.