High Times

My introduction to rock climbing was somewhat unusual in the respect that I tried it on something of a whim travelling in Thailand this past winter after inadvertently stumbling into one of the international meccas of sport climbing in Tonsai, in the Krabi province. I landed in Tonsai on the advice of a friend and planned to stop there for a couple of days and then move on to delve into the islands of the Andaman Sea for a few weeks, possibly train for my diving certification. Six weeks later with a few newly acquired muscles, a close-knit and varied group of friends with whom I had bonded both on and off the rocks, and a road atlas of multicoloured bruises and scrapes artistically scrawled across my body, I finally, reluctantly departed, amidst the ubiquitous shouts of “Au Nang, Au Nang!” and “pineapple, pineapple, donut!” echoing along the stretch of palm trees and bamboo mat scattered bars lining the beach. I was there long enough that at my last dinner at my favourite restaurant they made me a “goodbye cake” as a symbol of their well wishes. To be precise, with the lack of ovens and the absence of said confection in traditional Thai cuisine, it was actually a large, American-style pancake with “Good Luck” painted on it in chocolate frosting complimented by an ingenious rose garnish carved out of a tomato with lettuce forming its leaves. Ahh, Thailand, how I miss you and your quirkily incongruous menu items aimed at comforting homesick farangs . But I digress.

The second of January was the day of my initiation to the sport of rock climbing. I remember specifically because I was scheduled for the morning climb on the first but when I showed up fifteen minutes early (somewhat heroically, I thought, as I had celebrated the dawning of the new year downing buckets of vodka and Red Bull and dancing on the beach) the Thai guys from the climbing school were all too grimly hungover to do anything but laze red-eyed in the hammocks drooping from the wooden beams on the porch and told me to come back the next day. As I recall, in my last clear memory of Wee from the previous evening (I had met some of the boys from the climbing school the day before) he had an enormous spliff dangling from his lip and a bottle of Jack Daniels in each hand from which he was alternating swigs, so if that was indicative of the level of revelry perhaps I would be better off not being 25 meters above the ground with a still-wasted climbing guide shouting whiskey-muddled instructions from below.

The next day I went out for a half day top-roping course with a (presumably sober) instructor named Sol and a few other climbing hopefuls. Inwardly I was bitterly cursing my flip flop that had disloyally broken the day before as we hiked over the RAZOR sharp rocks that low tide reveals on the way to Eagle Wall, the crag where we would be climbing that day. We arrived at a tiny jewel of a beach which we crossed into the dense jungle forming its lush backdrop. The crag itself was easily accessible from here from a thickly rooted dirt pathway aided with a rope thoughtfully placed though of dubious reliability.

my first climb ever Kathryn Burnett My first climb ever. Photo: Kathryn Burnett.

We had two climbs, one graded a 5 and to its right a long and beautiful 6A called “Spiderman”. The exact details of the rest of the day after my hands and toes (clad in my borrowed, unfamiliar, and uncomfortably restrictive footwear) made that first contact with that mesmerizing limestone are irrelevant. After that first injection of the adrenaline-releasing exquisite high where you are clinging with precarious balance to a rock face high above the ground, and there is no map laid out to trace your tentative steps, and you are trusting your body weight on a foothold the size of a non-genetically modified peanut, and you are willing the moisture forming on your palms to evaporate because you are not yet fully aware of the presence of a little drawstring bag of chalk hanging at your waist for the express purpose of combating said symptom, and your muscles are strained to capacity, and a little rivulet of blood is making its way down your left shin, and there is no other place to go but UP...in the words of the Flaming Lips “suddenly everything has changed”.

I might add for background information that prior to my washing up on a long tail boat on the sands of Tonsai Beach I had been on what one might refer to as a bit of a wander. I had left the United States in November, 2006 to relocate to the small and absurdly picturesque Greek island of Mykonos based on the sort of wispy reasoning that can, if lassoed and combined with the proper timing, catalyze change, namely a loosely placed anxiety about the possibility of “missing out” on something as I whiled away my not-unpleasant days in the lovely beachfront community of Narragansett, Rhode Island and an intense desire for adventure, to open some mysterious box containing sparkling newness. I spent eight months in Mykonos initially, and as the novelty eroded and the sometimes empty, alcohol-saturated reality emerged in the spring I returned to the United States to re-evaluate and recharge my finances.

After three months back in Narragansett busily shaking martinis and batting my eyelashes for the twenty percent tips so crucial to my travel funds, I was as perplexed as ever. I had some money (thank you, eyelashes) and I knew precisely where I did not want to be, the trouble only being that I had not the vaguest idea of where I did want to be, or what it was that I wanted to do when I got there. The idea of whiling away a bitter white winter in New England twiddling my frost bitten thumbs and slipping into one of the existential crises into which I tend to submerge after too much idle time in America was less than appealing, as was the prospect of another soul-crushing red wine-drenched winter in Greece, from which the previous one my liver was still recovering. I found myself online for hours on end, my hands almost of their own avail typing in cheap flight search engines, and after all the accumulated daydreams and ticket prices solidified in a perfect puzzle piece configuration I had in my possession a ticket that would take me back to Greece for two months, Spain for two weeks, New Zealand for two weeks, Australia for one month, three months in southeast Asia, and back to Greece in the spring. Some entrance of credit card details, an exhilarating click on the “submit” button, and my next ten months or so were laid out before me, just waiting to be lived.

When I arrived in Thailand I had, needless to say, been to some pretty spectacular places and accumulated what felt like about four years of experience in four months. Spain was my time of rampant indulgence, filled with endless pitchers of sangria and tapas in Valencia, though I left with a slightly sour taste after being robbed in broad daylight in Barcelona. I had the time of my life hitch-hiking my way first through the jaw-dropping austerity of the south island of New Zealand and then about half the east coast of Australia in a rapid fire montage of pale rainbowed waterfalls, pristine aquamarine lakes and endless beaches, rugged snow-peaked scenery, sleeping under the stars in Castle Hill in New Zealand bundled like a mummy in my sleeping bag, catching a 13-hour lift from Byron Bay to Nararra with a truck driver named Shane and then body surfing on Terregal Beach in Australia on Christmas Day, and all of it was so free, so ME; I was utterly untethered and floating somewhere new and joyous every day. And what had I lost but monotony? And what had I gained but the world?

In that same spirit of enchantment, in the giddy heights of discovery, I climbed my very first rock in Tonsai. Again I had many choices laid out in the crevices and intricate indentations of the limestone I gripped, only this time the destination was a set point, a tangible ring-shaped goal that begged to be tapped in triumph. Here was a turning point, a solid threshold to reach demanding not only my attention but the utmost physical and psychological determination. Every sport-related cliché gained relevance: wanting something so desperately “you could taste it”, “adrenaline junky”, the word “addiction” assuming new and oddly positive associations. I would find my mind wandering at breakfast during the interminable wait for a bowl of porridge (my God, what were they DOING back there, sowing the oats?) contemplating whether there might be a handhold further to the right I had overlooked in the crux of a particular route and I would wake in the middle of the night to find my fists sweatily clenched and my feet pressing soft craters in the sheets, struggling, even in my dream state, to reach that elusive pinnacle.

Those six weeks in Tonsai were a special time in my life. I did some more climbing in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand and in Vang Vieng, Laos and spent some time in Cambodia before returning to Mykonos, and the climbing was lovely and peaceful, absent of the throngs of climbers in cue for popular routes, classes of beginners, and the odd chubby German tourist clicking voyeuristic shots in the Ibiza-reminiscent resort of Railey Beach adjacent to Tonsai, but nothing could compare to the splendour of the Krabi limestone.

Back in Greece I was struck with another impasse. My savings were dwindling at an alarming rate into the “dire straits” category, made even more painfully acute by the transition from the Cambodian real to the euro in the most expensive place in Greece. Two of my best friends from home had met me in Athens upon my return from Thailand, and although we spent a wonderful ten days together in Mykonos my return to a static state caused a loss of inertia that was sadly punctuated by their departure. There I was in this veritable island paradise with nothing to climb, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one in whom to confide my seemingly self-indulgent melancholy. Close to broke but not yet ready to go back to the States, I gathered my wits about me and secured a decent job at a taverna on the beach and proceeded to work every day for the next three months without a break to climb, write, or even think, functioning on the automatic pilot level that allows us to accomplish what we need but don’t necessarily want to do. At the end of that ridiculously overworked, underpaid, and drearily mundane period I was mysteriously “let go” from my job following an incident involving my informing a feeble-minded male associate that wiping glasses was not, in fact, “women’s work”. When the initial flood of upset and self-righteous indignation subsided it was time to weigh options yet again, and what I kept coming back to was the idea of being somewhere where I would be treated as a human being, somewhere I had contacts with good people, somewhere that wasn’t the United States, and somewhere I could, once again, dig my fingers into an unyielding, strength-affirming rock surface, not on which to vent my accumulated frustrations but with which, in the pure balance of mind and body it created, to render them obsolete.

Five days later I had a stuffed backpack once again, the climbing shoes and chalk bag were still clipped to the outside of the rucksack, the carabiner grown sticky with with moisture and the gathering sad dust of disuse, and I was on a plane to England. Since arriving here three weeks ago I have formulated and discarded several plans, and even now as I sit in the Botanical Gardens in Sheffield in the Peak District of England I find myself pulled in several different directions still, all seemingly equidistant. I have not only donned my climbing shoes again with a resurgence of my initiatory enthusiasm to learn the delicate art of trad climbing here in the pretty rolling hillsides of the English Midlands, with the same sense of renewal and a startling ripple of inspiration like a pebble dropped in a still lake I have finally picked up my long discarded notebook and pen, perhaps metaphorically recovered from that same corner of my bedroom in Mykonos where my climbing gear was gathering dust. Both activities open a valve for me to allow release, both challenge the very aspects of my being I strive most to improve, and both occasionally cause my hands to cramp in exhaustion. Even as I continue my gypsy-tinged vagrancy, I have grasped something even more solid than the intriguing English gritstone, and that something is self, and it is what serves to keep us grounded however high we may ascend.

I remain uncertain of which direction my path will meander next, but when I look up at those gorgeous routes etched in multi-layered stone stretching up to the mercurial English sky, rarely following a straight-line sequence themselves, I am sure of one thing. Wherever I may be in this world, and whatever magnets of the north, south, east, or west poles exert the most powerful pull on me, there is one direction in which I will be perpetually drawn, and that direction is UP.