Is this place even real?
I stepped off the boat and found myself in the little-known hippie / rasta beach village of Tonsai. Most tourists visit the more developed Railay Beach nearby, but Tonsai is where most climbers stay and you can get bungalows on the cheap. I knew Dave was staying at the Jungle Hut so I oriented myself to the layout of Tonsai and headed back there.
This is roughly how Tonsai is laid out.
Very shortly after I met up with Dave (or as I like to call him, Coyote Dave). Dave and I met over three years ago in Potrero Chico, Mexico, and as both of us were "long-term" climbers there, we quickly became good friends. Dave is a fellow nerd, formerly focusing on web development and now studying robotics at CU-Boulder. In fact, he developed this very awesome Potrero Chico website which I personally consider to be the best. But I'm biased. In any case, Dave had already been in Thailand for nearly six weeks and only had a few short days left in Tonsai, so he let me sleep in his hammock on the porch of his bungalow for the low low price of 100 baht per night, and then he let me take over his bungalow when he left for only 325 baht per night. Shya!
Jungle Hut bungalow! Climbers reuinte!
In the afternoon of my arrival, Dave and I headed out to the Fire Wall to do a quick easy 6b as my first Tonsai climb. The rock is yellow/orange limestone mostly, and is absolutely riddled with tufas and pockets, and although I'd like to say that I've climbed plenty of limestone in my life (thanks Mexico!) this limestone was really completely different from anything I'd ever climbed before. Footholds are often polished but the routes tend to be overhanging and have huge jugs for hands. The kind of place where your biceps get stronger than your fingers, and if you keep at it you get really strong.
After the 6b warmup, Dave wanted to try out a really classic route called Burnt Offerings, which goes at 7a+. For you Americans, that is roughly equivalent to a 5.12a sport route. It starts out in this pretty cool cave and you then find yourself traversing across the lip of the cave and then up and over the cruxy overhanging finish. Dave worked it pretty well, making it to the cruxy part, and then he convinced me to try. I wasn't particularly keen to try hard at the time, so I only climbed the first couple of moves and then I was good. I'd like to blame the fact that I was hot and dehydrated and not acclimated to the heat and humidity, which is true. That's one thing I didn't quite realize about climbing in southern Thailand: it's fucking hot. I was sweating like crazy before I even started climbing, and sweaty palms do not a good send make. So we bailed right after watching another party trying the route with much more success =)
A Korean girl absolutely rocking this route.
Anyway, we quit climbing for the day and he introduced me to some friends and we had dinner and I believe we went out for drinks at one of the village bars. The cool thing about the bars in Tonsai is that they are all outside in the open air, and instead of standing packed inside of a building you typically sit down on wooden decks and drink and relax. It's definitely a very laidback, jungle rasta vibe. Many of the bars put on fire shows, or slackline and fire shows, or sometimes there is a band playing, but ultimately it's a very friendly place, and the visitors are very international, so when you meet people (and it's easy to meet people), you never quite know which country they will be from. I should mention, nearly everyone in Thailand, including the Thais themselves, speaks English or at the very least enough broken English to get by, so if you're lucky enough to be from an English-speaking country you will be able to converse with nearly everyone you meet. However, there were enough French/Canadians/Germans around that I definitely wished that I was competent not only in Spanish but in French and German as well. Maybe next time.
My favorite bar in Tonsai, Small World Bar.
Dave and I unfortunately didn't quite manage to climb much together in the next couple of days; his next day was a rest day so I merely convinced him to belay me on Groove Tube, a fun/easy/classic 6a on the Fire Wall. It was pretty groovy. The next day Dave and I planned to go deep-water soloing together via BaseCamp Tonsai (on a paid/guided excursion), but I woke up super nauseous and decided to cancel; ended up throwing up three times that day, probably due to food poisoning of some sort. Dave ended up partying long into the night with his Tonsai friends for his last night while I slept most of the evening and night in the hammock, so we couldn't get on the same schedule to climb on his last day either. I did end up climbing with two of his friends from Sweden though, Simon and Seven, the first of whom I *probably* met in Mexico three years ago as well. We tried a couple of 6b+ routes at the Tyrolean Wall and a 6a at Dum's Kitchen, all of which were fun, but by midday it was too hot to climb and I wanted to say goodbye to Dave.
Tonsai Roof Wall, near Dum's Kitchen.
Later that night I ended hanging out with some of Dave's friends, and got invited to a house party, and ended up using my glowing juggling balls to entertain quite a few people. They weren't completely sober, if you know what I mean, so the juggling light show was quite a hit so despite my new "alone in Thailand" status I made some friendships of my own. Success!
Glowing juggling balls for the win.
No comments:
Post a Comment