Climbing Krabi

So I got up again, this time pretty early on, to try and catch my ride to the day’s fun of climbing. The van was a bit late picking me up, but not late enough for me to get a solid breakfast anywhere nearby, so I hopped in with a bunch of other people who were all just barely talkative. I was pretty tired, actually, so I mostly kept to myself at first, shutting my eyes to catch a little more rest.

There was another American girl in the car, and as it turned out, she went to university in San Diego, but a different university than myself. Small world, eh? She was pretty talkative, so I rolled with it, and she became my main talking buddy for the first half of the day. The van took us to a dock, and we all hopped into another one of those swiftboats, and were shortly brought to West Raileh beach, then walked from there to the climbing office/store. There, we all filled out forms that said its our fault if we die, suited up, took some water, and rolled out. It was just a short walk from there to the walls we were going to climb.

The cliffs were beautiful, even if I didn’t recognize them from the pictures I had studied so carefully of climbing in Krabi from these past couple years. It took a while for everything to get set up; we had two or three guides with us who were setting up the ropes for the rest of us to climb. Our group was comprised of maybe eight young Danish kids, a Spanish couple, a German couple, us two Americans, and maybe another person or two I forget. Here’s a couple pictures of the scene:

 

  

 

I was second up for climbing, and the first climb was pretty straightforward. It was only maybe 40 feet high total, and had tons of really easy holds. I didn’t enjoy the climb in its holistic sense as much as I should have, but it was still a nice rush to get back into it. It had been over a year since I had last touched bare rock, and unlike riding a bike, it does go away if you don’t use it. And I’m not just talking about the muscle and tendon strength. In a way, one’s abilitiy to interface with the entire environment goes away. The acclimation to the dust of rock needs to be built up again, and the ability to get over vertigo, to get over one’s fear of heights, how to learn to love the rope, its all rough. Its always a little nerve-wracking to put your life back in the hands of people you don’t know, also, and this was no exception.

I made it to the top, though, and made it down safely to the bottom as well, and then I got to rest while dealing with the adrenaline rush of having accomplished one of my dreams. I waited patiently for another rope to be set up, and the next choice they made ended up being a bit intimidating. It was probably about 100 feet high, and silly though it might’ve been, I was scared. I had no choice but to tackle it anyway, and I was second up, yet again. I had one of the Danish guys take some pictures of me as I tackled it, and here’s the result:

 

  

  

  

It was a pretty brutal climb, especially for being as out of climbing shape as I really am. When I got to the bottom, I was a bit disappointed to realize that that was it for me for the day. There was simply no way my arms and hands could withstand another climb, and make it even halfway up.

So for the next hour or so, I walked around taking a few pictures here and there. 

 

 

The tide approached, and pretty soon kicked us out of the area, just in time to go get lunch. I decided I was going to go back on the boat with the half day trip people, isntead of sticking around for another four hours with the full day trip people. We didn’t exactly all go back at the same time, though, and I took it for granted that I’d have no trouble finding my way. What foolishness on my part. A simple jaunt back to where we started turned into me being lost on the peninsula, spending well over an hour and a half scouring the entire damn place looking for everyone, before finally being told how to get where I wanted to go by another rock climbing outfit. Oddly enough, the Danes were still there having lunch. Turns out there’s a two hour break in between climbing shifts. I was utterly exhausted at this point. The people running the climbing group had no sympathy, and were somewhat angry that I had disappeared such as I had, having no concern for my own distress, and then shoved the lunch my money had paid for at me. I had my fill of the rice, then just hung out with the Danish kids for an hour or so. They were all pretty nice, ranging from 18 to 24 years old, and living the good life, “studying” in Thailand in nearby Koh Samui for a semester before moving on to more important things in their lives. I got to know way more than I had ever bargained for about the structure of Denmark, but it helped soothe my nerves after the troubles I had just gone through.

The company refused to help me out with getting back to Aonang, so I had to pay for my own boat back. Because it was about 2pm, there weren’t many people in the area who wanted to go back to Aonang, and the boats won’t take off without a full load of people, so I had to wait around half an hour in the blistering sun until the requisite number of people finally showed up. The people I was surrounded by who were also waiting were an odd group. One fully dressed Chinese guy, one almost fully undressed British guy who had the most intimidating musculature I’ve ever seen on another human being, given that he seemed to have 0% body fat . . .  it wasn’t that he was like a hulk or anything, but he was like perfectly tanned and toned, and rocking out nothing but a speedo. It was like having Calvin Klein’s models right next to me waiting for a little boat. I wished he had a newspaper to cover himself up or something.

Anyway, a family ultimately came along and filled the last several spots, and off we went. You could not come up with a much bigger contrast than between Mr. Speedo and this old German family. Such is the life at holiday resorts, I guess.

When I got back to the beach, I was utterly exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to just hang out in the water, so I threw my stuff in my room and came back out just to be in the ocean a bit. The only problem was that, by this time, it was low tide. And when its low tide, its really frickin lowtide. I walked out at least half a mile, and I still wasn’t in waist deep water. Because of how long it took to get out there, I had been privy to all the weird things in the water there, and in the sand. Sea cucumbers, millions of little crabs and hermit crabs, fishies, jellyfish, and some other unidentifiable stuff. It ended up getting into the back of my brain a bit, and made me nervous about going even further for some weird reason, just in case i encountered even more weird stuff. So I floated around as best I could at that point, and just stayed out there for maybe half an hour, in pretty stark contrast to my experience on the beach just one day prior.

Afterwards, I still had time to kill. I mean really, what else is there to do on a beach when the water is gone? So I walked up and down the other parts of the beach I hadn’t seen yet, just to see what I could find; mostly I just found a lot of dead sealife, and then a couple bits of randomness. Me and a little Thai kid played around with the corpse of a jellyfish together for a bit. Shit those things are heavy. Jellyfish corpses, that is, not Thai kids. They’re pretty tiny.

Another trip home, another bit of last minute planning for the next day; I bought some tickets to get from Krabi to Phuket. The guys I had hung out with the previous night had done a good job of convincing me to not take the boat to Phuket, but instead to take the bus, as the two were about the same length of time, and the boat was supposed to be a pretty rocky ride. They had taken it in the opposite direction, and one guy on the boat with them bounced off the seat at one bit of wake, and when he landed, threw his back out. I figured I could do without risking this kind of crap, so just decided to go with the bus.

I got another underwhelming dinner, and afterwards decided to go check out this free nightly cabaret show up the street. I don’t think I took any pictures, or at least I couldn’t find any on my discs. That might be for the best. It was a ladyboy cabaret show, and it was incredibly sad. There was maybe ten people there watching. One was a group of about 6 people who had actually had dinner and were making a thing of it, I think they enjoyed the absurdity of it. None of us sat close to the stage, the closest being only in the halfway section.

The “girls” were mostly doing uninspired dance routines and miming to the tune of Chinese pop songs, and most of it was so boring that it bears little reason for commenting. One exception was the second to last tune, though, which was so absurd it might’ve been brilliant.

This one featured a rather obese ladyboy. Or rather, two of them, but really just one. It started with these two simulating a strange sort of Cinderella scene, where the ugly stepsister beats the the Cinderella surrogate, except the surrogate is just as not so pretty as the stepsister. Also, she’s pregnant. Then, after giving a good thrashing, the stepsister goes offstage, and this is where the dance routine really starts. Suddenly, this faux-pregnant Thai ladybody Cinderella surrogate starts dancing along to, naturally, Hava Nagila, that stereotypical Jewish song.

Clearly, my mere mortal mind is not equipped to deal with the artistic genius that was this production. So when it came to a close, I threw in my hat and left the building, having been humbled in ways I never knew to be possible.

Walking back to my hotel, I ran into the two American guys from the previous night again, and sat down with them to blast the night away with mostly meaningless talk. It was nice, though, and a welcome palatte cleanser after the performance I had just been victim of.

Afterwards, I went to get a massage to take the edge off the pain from climbing earlier in the day. That was an interesting experience in its own right. I’ll spare the details, but the masseuse ended up telling me that even though she had only known me a short time, she knew that she loved me.

It seems that a hasty retreat has become a running theme in my life at this point.

As I walked back with equal mixtures of confusion, horror, and awe, a small fight broke out across the street. It wasn’t a fistfight, but rather, some sort of very vocal argument between an old Australian couple. From the few bits I could gather, it seems she was upset with him for a tryst he had with some Thai girl in the past or something. “That was only one time, two years ago!” That sort of thing.

The two were pretty angry, whatever it was, though, and a little Thai girl ahead of me on the same side of street shouted out for me to go do something about it, because she was too little herself to do anything. I agreed in general that something should be done, but from the looks of it, each of these people were inebriated as well, and I wasn’t about to get in the middle of that for nothing. So I kept my distance for the time being, and watched to make sure it didn’t become physical. It didn’t, and within ten minutes, it quieted down, and the two of them were walking off to wherever together.

The Thai girl that had called out to me just prior started talking to me a bit, about what had just happened. She invited me to sit down next to her, and I ended up talking to her for well over an hour.

She was a tiny little girl, certainly not over five feet, and pretty amazingly cool. She had never gone to middle school, even, and was from a tiny little village where they got their food from the ground, rather than buying it, and had ultimately made her way towards Krabi, and somehow ended up becoming the manager of a bar there, called Daniel’s. Turns out Daniel is the English name she chose for herself, quite intentionally, because she was a tomboy, and a lesbian at that, so preferred to have a boy’s name. She learned English entirely on her own, and sure it wasn’t perfect, but it was damn impressive for a person who had only ever had a few years of schooling.

She introduced me to her various siblings who were also working there. She had basically dragged them out of their village to help her work at this place, and to try to improve the quality of life for her whole family. From all appearances, it seems like she had succeeded at this quite handily, and I can’t help but admire her for what she had accomplished.

At some point, another random Thai girl walked by, and started talking to Daniel. Then she started talking to me some, and suggested we head into that bar of Daniel’s, which I had presumed to be closed, but Daniel was quite encouraging of us heading in there as well. I didn’t exactly have anything else to do, so I figured sure, why not?

The bar inside did not match Daniel’s personality at all. My god was it gaudy. Disco balls and strobe lights and crazy colors everywhere. But it was really spacious, probably one of the biggest bars in town, and I was quite surprised that this was all in the care of a little village girl with no education.

The new Thai girl, whose name I never did get, started doing her best to talk to me. She had a rather small repertoire to work with, though. It went something like this.

“I country music, like singing!”

“I make reservation, ten days. No friend, no boyfriend, sleep alone. Understand?”

“You have friend?”

Mix and match as much as you can come up with, then repeat times a thousand. It rather made me miss my conversation with Daniel. At one point, she got up to go to the bathroom, but then pulled out a little placard and plopped it down on the seat behind her. I took a look at it, and it was a menu of massages. You can’t make this stuff up.

Up until this point though, it had been a mostly pretty normal conversation, so I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. When she came back, though, and we talked a bit more, and I told her I was going to Phuket the next morning, she told me that she could come with me if I wanted. In my head I was thinking “what was that about the reservation you made for ten days that you told me about a thousand times?” but out loud I just said that I didn’t think there was enough space.

There was pretty much no one else in the bar, and Daniel wasn’t coming down nearly as soon as she had suggested she would. I was sort of stuck with no good way out. So i took another drink and tried to idle away the time as that girl whittled away the few lines of English conversation she had learned until I had as much as I could, and made yet another retreat, this time not so hasty. Oh, and at some point I did have to, in fact, address the placard and that I wasn’t interested in any of her services. In a few short hours, I’d be on my way to Phuket.