Going Up, Going Down

I’ve been back in the UK for several weeks now, but for a while I was starting to feel a bit “stuck” in Thailand.  I didn’t want to say too much earlier in case it was rejected or something, but I’ve just received a long-term UK visa, with the aim of getting a UK passport down the track.  Covid made us feel a little insecure with our carefree approach to planning, hence the UK house purchase, Helen’s NZ Permanent Residence, and my move to get a UK passport.  While we still don’t know what our long-term plans are, these actions buy us flexibility. 

My application had been with Her Majesty’s Passport Office far longer than the advertised turnaround time, but thinking that Her Majesty may be busy celebrating her jubilee (“congratulations, mam”), I pushed my flight back a couple of times.  On the very day of my updated booking and just as I was pondering calling the airline for a further delay, my passport turned up, with a faint scent of celebratory Pimms.  After a busy couple of hours putting Aroha to bed in the marina and a taxi across to Phuket, I was finally heading to the UK!

There are many things that I am not good at, and sitting still waiting is one of them.  So, when my visa application was dragging on, I was determined to make the most of my time floating around the Krabi area.

Railay beach, and Tonsai in the next bay along, are well known for rock climbing and I’ve found myself drifting back there a few times over the past couple of months.  There are loads of bolted routes, guide services, or other independent climbers to meet up with.

I’ve been climbing for a few years now, although not at all over the covid-years.  Pre-covid I’d started to lead climbs – that is, instead of climbing with a pre-set rope attached from you to the top of the crag and back to your belayer, you attach the rope to fixed bolts as you climb.  Of course, there’s no real difference in the route, but there’s a huge difference in the way your head thinks about it, including, in my case, a growing fear of falling.  When leading, your potential fall can be a lot longer once you’re above the last bolt, since you need to fall further for the rope to become taut.  “If I fall now, I’ll land on that jagged bit before my rope catches me”, “If I fall now, I’ll ….”.  You get the picture.  I’m far from an expert of controlling what goes through my monkey brain and I know I have a silly tendency to think of the worst-case outcome.  I frequently used my deep breathing technique to try to keep my stress in check – some of the local guides started called me “cobra” as apparently, my deep breathing-out sound mimics that of the local cobras warning hiss.

Life is full of paradoxes and rock climbing is no different.  Falls on harder routes are often less dangerous because the wall is likely to be steeper, with a shorter distance between bolts.  And a lighter belay partner will give a heavier climber a softer fall – them being lifted off the ground softens the fall.  Of course, there’s a limit – many of the local Thai climbing guides are quite small, so if they’re belaying a, ahem, “big-boned” “farang” climber like me, they attach themselves to a sandbag for extra weight or a fixed point on the ground.

I spent a bit of time on YouTube afterwards and in a funny way I was pleased to see that my situation is quite common for new climbers trying to gain experience.  Many reach a kind of plateau once they start to lead climbs, because the fear of falling prevents them from pushing themselves to the next level.  I think in my next sessions I need to practice falling.

One Friday afternoon, whilst resting between climbs, my climbing buddy and guide couldn’t help but notice a tour boat disgorge a group of pretty bikini girls on to the nearby beach.  “Bangkok socialites…”, our guide explained their arrival just in time for the weekend.  My eye is drawn to a pretty girl in a bikini as much as the next guy… so I was watching as closely as is polite, as one of the last ones to step off the boat, a little awkwardly down the ladder on to the beach, revealed a surprisingly hairy ball sack slip out of her bikini.  Thailand is well ahead of most of the world in gender fluidity, but the thing that surprised me most was; and please excuse my pronouns here because I tend to get a little confused; that I was surprised that she didn’t manscape his scrotum a little more delicately.

With the monsoon season establishing itself, the semi-sheltered anchorages around Railay became less comfortable.  One afternoon I was chilling at anchor watching Netflix when the persistent rolling swell, which I’d done my best to ignore until then, threw my Ipad onto the floor, producing a hairline crack across the screen.  Enough is enough!  After a quick tide and weather check, I decided to move the short distance back to the marina and put Aroha to bed for a little while.

The following day I took the ferry over to Koh Phi Phi, about two hours in a crowded, legroom-less death trap boat.  But it was nice for someone else to be driving for a change!

I didn’t like Koh Phi Phi at all at first, but it kind of grew on me.  I often find that it takes a couple of days for me to get to like a new place and the tourist-ghetto that is Phi Phi was no different.  Apparently, it was pretty much flattened in the 2004 tsunami and I’m a little surprised that they didn’t take that tragic opportunity to make the place a bit more attractive.  I get the impression that Thais are very entrepreneurial, and it feels like every business owner has frantically built back their business with little thought of the bigger picture.  But despite its disorganised messiness, you can see the attraction with everything young travellers need; boat and diving trips, tattoo and massage parlours, and even McDonalds and Burger King just back from the beach, in probably the only two buildings on the island that have ever had a sniff at a building permit.

Being underwater is one of my happy places – I find it so relaxing it seems to slow down time.  I checked my diving logbook and see that over the years I’ve spent almost three cumulative weeks underwater – not bad considering a typical dive is less than an hour long.

When fitting out Aroha for cruising, one of the first decisions we took was to not install a dive compressor.  Aroha’s not quite big enough for it and I didn’t want another piece of kit to maintain.  At that time, we mentally banked the four boat-dollars (and ongoing costs) that we saved and put into the “diving with dive centres” pot.  Diving’s never a cheap activity, but at least the diving in Thailand is about half the price of what we were used to compared to UAE and Oman.

This is the diving off-season for Phi Phi but I was lucky to get a few good days diving off Koh Phi Phi Leh- the nearby island made famous for being the location of the film “The Beach”.  The day the film was released back in 2000 happened to be the very day I flew to Bangkok for a two-month backpacking trip, so I revelled in reading the book the proceeding days, caught the film on the release day, and flew to Bangkok that evening.  I was so dedicated to the cause that I even stayed in the tourist ghetto Khao San Road, staying in a similar level of accommodating as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character.

With appetite whetted, next season we hope to dive more at Koh Phi Phi and also at another diving hot spot further south, Koh Lipe.

There’s some nice hiking on the island and I found good trails over most of the island.  The reduced tourist numbers have left some of the trails pretty overgrown, but thankfully generations of thoughtful earlier walkers have left plenty of discarded water bottles and coke cans.  They could have been left as thoughtful consideration for future wayfinding purposes, but sadly more likely that they just didn’t follow the “leave only footprints” mantra.

I prefer the term “without trail” over “lost”, and I found myself one morning “without trail” for several hours one morning.  Being somewhat off-piste, at one point as I pushed past a scrub I felt a sting in my side so excruciating that I thought I might have disturbed a snake – my biggest fear.  I think it was more likely a wasp like creature, and as the pain eased I started to feel a bit lightheaded.  The dizziness faded in proportion to my fear of falling unconscious in the dense jungle, and I continued on my way a little more cautious of stinging and biting jungle animals.

Back at the marina I heard a cobra hiss as I almost stepped on one crossing my path on day.  I now appreciated my “cobra” climbing nickname, as well as the warning the cobra gave me to keep away.

So, my six week visa waiting time was not wasted, and at least with all my adventure sports I survived long enough to make it back to the UK.  Helen and I had spent three months apart so my arrival back in the UK was long overdue.  Thailand already seems like a world away, but I am managing to find ways to reincorporate my sporting activities of climbing, sailing and hiking into our new lifestyle in Devon.  There are fewer creepy crawlies and none that are likely to be life threatening so I should be able to survive until we return to the boat later this year.

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