Thailand - Tonsai

February 22 - March 16, 2007

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We flew from Sydney to Bangkok and, after less than 24 hours, fled Bangkok in hopes of preserving our sanity. (That place is crazy!) We took an overnight train down to the Krabi region, which is way down south on the west side of Thailand, bordering the Andaman Sea. We made our way to Tonsai, the main climbing island and found the perfect little hut to hunker down in for the next few weeks. It was absolutely wonderful to have space of our own and to not be moving around every other day.

The climbing was everything I hoped it would be. There are so many limestone cliffs chocked full of glorious climbing routes, that it's difficult to choose which ones to do each day. I felt like a kid in a candy store! Most of the routes are pretty steep, with the majority starting at 5.10c. But that turned out to be fine for us and we never ran out of options. Some of the more popular routes were polished and therefore quite frightening, but the rock was really positive once you got off the well-beaten path a bit.

We were a bit disappointed with the vibe of the place. We were expecting something like Mexico where the climbing community is so tight that you often meet friends-for-life while you're staying there. That wasn't the case for us in Tonsai. We met plenty of people, but only established one or two long-term relationships. We had hoped that we would meet people and hang out with them for our entire stay in Thailand, but it just didn't work out that way. We were a little lonely from time to time and really longed for those relationships, but that's just the way it goes sometimes. As luck would have it, two of our dearest friends came to Thailand to visit us. It's ironic that, at a time when we couldn't develop close friendships, we had our closest friends coming out to be with us. Such a sweet life we lead.

Karl brought his friend Tallis and then Amy joined up with us one day later. We had a fantastic week together climbing, laughing, sweating, swimming, drinking thai ice teas and battling the food poison demons. We were very sad when everyone left, but we bucked ourselves up with some thai massages, made some new friends and danced our sadness away.

Beautiful West Railay