inconsistent news from southeast asia

Last I got around to updating, I think it was on this selfsame computer... Maybe we've become lazy travellers. As promised, the last nine days was spent in Ton Sai, doing very little. Consequently, very little news.

The night before we left, I got up to go to the bathroom at about 2 a.m., only to be confronted by a huge black scorpion that promptly scuttled over and nested halfway under our door frame. I spent a lot of time standing there staring, as I recall, before I woke Catherine up to join me in the staring. I think we just stood there and watched it do almost nothing for ten minutes. Never expected to see a scorpion in Krabi. Yeah, there's a picture to prove it, but it's blurry and hardly worth posting.

The first five days or so we spent in Ton Sai, we really did manage to do nothing. We got up late and sat on the beach. I went through the books we'd bought for the week at an alarming rate. Read the new(est) Hunter Thompson and was grossly dissapointed. We even went to bed early, though we did get to a bar one night and caught their nifty fire-twirly show thingy. Other people in Ton Sai also seem to have a lot of time on their hands so some of them seem to spend time.. umm.. doing this.

I suppose the doing nothing got old, so we signed up for a half-day of rock climbing, this being the thing to do in Ton Sai. So we might as well give it a try, right? Somehow, I also signed up for a "SUPER DAY" at a local dive place, scheduled for the next day. Suddenly there was a lot to do.

So, we had a half day of climbing on some beginner routes on the beach. It was fairly neat, if awfully difficult when it did get difficult.

What to say about the climbing? Catherine wasn't sure it could be classified as fun, but she seemed to be doing pretty well up there, most of the time. Better going up than she was at going down.

I didn't have too much trouble with the climbing until the top of the biggest (30m) climb, where it got awfully hairy. I'm still not sure how anyone's supposed to be able to do that. I have some very intense memories of a few minutes spent clutching a crappy handhold while my exhausted legs shook, resting on some small knobs down below. Meanwhile, Nan's yelling "Put right foot where left foot is!! Put right foot where left foot is!" I'm still not sure how I was supposed to do that without a handhold for my left hand. It was an interesting few minutes, though.

I still insist it was fun, however.

It's a good thing we didn't sign up for more than a half day. The wrists and hands where not fit for anything by the end of four climbs and it lasted the next couple days. Here's a good illustration of our condition after the morning spent climbing.

The next day, I did in fact go out and do three dives. I was still tired, but the diving was good. Took no pictures, saw a banded sea-snake. And we sort of saw a shark. It was in a cave, you see, but I did witness bits of it's rear end in the light of our divemaster's flashlight. I also completed my deep dive "adventure dive", so I'm now licensed to dive to 30m instead of 18. Whee.