Time Stands Still
December 18, 2005 7:02 am General
I never really got a chance to blog about the wonderful trip to Thailand a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t want to read this blog entry, the summary is ‘Wow, Thailand is a fantastic place, with wonderful food, great people and a super chilled out atmosphere’. The reality is that summary doesn’t really do justice to the amazing time I had there, which was probably a reflection of the lovely group of people I shared my time with – Patrick, Mhairi, Dave, Warrick, Steve, Yvonne, Michelle, and Phil. We were staying in Tonsai, a little bay down south on the west coast of Thailand, not far from Krabi.
By stark contrast to the resorts of Rai Lay, Tonsai hasn’t developed to the traditional sun seeker holiday and instead caters for predominently climbers. It’s a very chilled out atmosphere. No one is in a hurry, and there’s a party going on almost every night in one of the bars – I’m pretty sure they take it in turns. There’s almost nothing to spend your money on, except of course for massages – both Thai and oil costing about $10 NZD for a good hour. Thai massage seems to focus more on manipulation and digging their fingers into your muscles. Oil massage was a much nicer experience, more so because of the candle lit and soft noise of the gentle breeze blowing through the chains of shells that hung from the sides of the hut. Bliss.
From the very start, we all experienced great food, visiting many of the restaurants Tonsai had to offer – both down by the shore with great views through to Thaiwand wall and those higher up tucked away in the jungle. Out of the many restaurants we all seemed to favour a place called Tina’s, that did a mean seafood Phad Thai and fish with sweet chilli. Most of the main courses typically costed about $2 NZD so it was great to stack on a couple of them after a hard days climbing. We stumbled across Chang beer, a strong brew of 6.2% alcohol early on in the trip. After a long day out in the sun, it’s hard to know whether you can be a ‘double-chang-man’ or a ‘triple-chang-man’ [difficult to say while drunk]. Dave tested the limit being a ‘quadruple-chang-man’, and was soon floating around during an impromptu nudie swim yelling out ‘DO WANNA SEE MY GOODIES??!’.
Of course we weren’t there to enjoy ourselves, there was climbing to do. Phil mentioned that most of the top world climbers don’t go to Thailand because of the heat, and after the first days or two battling with the sweat I can appreciate that. The routes are amazing though, and as long as you stick away from the easy to get to and low grade routes you’ll avoid much of the polish. Dave was my climbing partner for the 2 weeks I spent there, and it was really wonderful to see his technique improve day by day. We started off relatively slowly although tackled a 6b by mistake on the first day that deflated our egos a little. By the end we were mostly solid on 6b and 6b+. On one of the scarier routes we climbed up through a whole bunch of stalagtites into relatively unknown territory with Dave taking the lead on an amazingly exposed traverse with *huge* drops below. Lots of climbing to do – we only just touched the surface while I was there. Too bad I didn’t get to climb Humanality, it sounded like a blast!
On one of our rest days, we took a long boat out to one of the islands out from across our bay called ‘Chicken Island’ aptly named because one of the towers looks like a chicken head. We hired some masks, fins and snorkles and dived overboard. I’ve never been snorkling before [sheltered life] but it was the most incredible experience I’ve had, and it’s totally motivated me to go for a scuba course at some stage. It didn’t appear like the tsunami had a big effect on the reefs because it was teeming with life. At one stage Steve handed me a bag of rice crispies and when you put it under the water you’re suddenly surrounded by literally 100’s of little fish. Everywhere you look you only see fish – it’s actually kind scarey in many respects. Another day Dave, Warrick and I took the opportunity to head out for a nudie snorkel [there’s a bit of a theme running] – although most of us swam holding our crotch just in case. Dave took me under his wing [not while nude] and showed me a few basic techniques for diving down, and equalizing and stuff, and towards the end I was finally feeling like I was making some progress of feeling comfortable instead of choking full of seawater. Definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me.
For another rest day, we headed over to Ko Phi Phi an island heavily effected by the tsunami. I never really got a chance to see any of the photos in their tsunami center, but judging on the amount of building work going on, it must have left the place in a pretty terrible state. Very much alive and kicking though a year later, and packed with 100’s of tourists coming in on the ferries each day. We only spent about 24 hours there, but packed a huge amount in including a big night in the Apache club, with Phil chatting up the ladymen, and Dave dancing on the pole. They even serve drinks in buckets. Hangovers the next morning pretty much wiped us out – for Warrick it seemed to be a rather awful bug or food poisoning, and knocked him out for a few days later. Definitely a party town.
We got talking to an American electrician one night about the Tonsai electricity problem that he was attempting to fix. Seemingly it’s a mess, and that the circuits are blown on a regular basis causing half of bay to plunge into darkness – the community there have started to rely on candles, cooking with gas, and generally preserving the electricity supply they create with big generators back in the jungle. I like this approach. It fitted in with the general laid back atmosphere of the place. Americans always ruin everything [kidding].
What was I thinking when I bought peach coloured pants? They’ve since been dyed grey.
