Having decided that twelve hours immersing ourselves in the local culture was more than sufficient we piled into the minibus and headed to Ao Nang where we checked into a Holiday Inn for two days to recover. On entering our air conditioned rooms we gave a collective moan of ecstasy. The tour leader had to prise us out of them with a crowbar.
Ao Nang is a tourist town whose principal attraction is its convenience to a bunch of attractions. Beautiful islands abound just off the coast, caves beckon, offering shelter from the heat and interesting rock formations to justify your decision, there’s even a shooting range if that takes your fancy. My particular fancy couldn’t have been less interested.
Instead I spent half a day staring at a cliff face. One of the options offered by Ao Nang was rock climbing and for some reason I decided the best thing I could on a day when the temperature hit forty degrees in the shade was to cover myself in chalk and scramble up a semi sheer limestone cliff. I made careful enquiries; did it matter if your rock climbing experience was minimal? Not at all. Did it matter if by minimal I actually meant none at all? Apparently not. I thought of asking if it mattered if you were scared of heights but decided that two out of three was a pass.
The next morning bright and early, before I had a chance to back out, I was bundled into the back of a van and driven to an undisclosed location on the outskirts of Ao Nang. There I was kitted with a harness, shoes and chalk and escorted to a boat. I was assured the rock climbing was perfectly safe and then asked for a contact name in case of emergencies. Presumably just in case I was hit by a bus crossing the street outside the rock climbing centre. The boat ride was slow enough to give me plenty of time to review my life choices in general and the decision to go rock climbing in particular. I had just reached a conclusion which didn’t reflect well on my decision making skills when we arrived.
The location for the climb was a narrow beach surrounded by cliffs that were festooned with ropes, rock for the climbing of. I don’t actually think the cliffs were terribly high but they were many times higher than you could fall off and expect to walk away afterwards. After some last minute instructions centred around tying of various knots which would keep fatal falls in the realm of the theoretical I was pointed at a convenient section of cliff and essentially told to get on with it.
Things didn’t exactly go well. I got part way up, lost my grip with one hand, panicked and lost the grip with all my other hands as well. As a consequence I fell off the cliff. I dangled there for a moment with terror rapidly turning to embarrassment and was then lowered gently groundward. Once I’d recovered my equilibrium and the staff had stopped laughing they tried me on something simpler. Inappropriately dressed Asian women were going up and down it in stilettos. Somehow I did manage this one and with a measure of confidence gained I attempted a third and somewhat more difficult one. I got a great view of the bay from my (not particularly) lofty vantage point. At that stage I decided to quit while I was ahead.
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