The actual climb was perfect. Pristine, juggy Thai limestone. The kind of rock that makes you feel like a real climber, even when your shiny buckles and scuff-free shoes give you away as something else altogether.
But the flutter still started just above the third bolt, with a tricky shuffle over to the left. This is when my mind started to add up the problem. My belayer, a local guide called Too, was good at talking idiot Brits/Germans/Israelis up easy rock climbs. He was also good at preparing a papaya salad so spicy that we worried about getting it too close to our ropes for fear of corrosion. But he was not good at being heavy. In fact, at 45kg he was exactly half my weight (sadly the hilarious comment that I was “two times Too” did not quite cross the language barrier).
So, my head was soon ringing with the vision of a bone-crunching groundfall for me, whilst Too hangs puppet-like halfway up this cliff. “No slips, no slips”, I muttered to myself as I stretched out left, jammed my right knee into the crack, and then clipped another bolt. Deep breath. Still alive. My thumping chest told me this was different to top-roping, this was brilliant!
What next? As I caught my breath, the scrabbling and jabbering from above me could mean only one thing – our furry friends were back, and they had impeccable timing. The troop of macaque monkeys had kept us off the crag for an hour this morning, and now I had to stand quietly on the ledge as they followed each other carefully down the route to my right. The big daddies went first, and thankfully they gave me a wide berth as they had some nasty looking teeth and smelt like an unemptied kitchen bin. Then the babies, hanging playfully off little holds as if deliberately mocking my earlier shuffling. This was a lesson, but I knew I could never learn such poise, balance, fluidity.
Getting to the top was easy after that, if not particularly pretty. Clipping the anchor, I realised how knotted my shoulders were, and looking behind me I could see the beach glittering white hundreds of feet below. My girlfriend was down there somewhere, not realising that her life had changed as well as mine (or at least her future holiday destinations had).
Convincing my adrenaline-addled brain that it was a good idea to untie my knot 30m off the ground in order to thread the belay was another challenge, but soon I was dodging the monkey shit as I lowered back down the crag. And Too? He was tied on to a very sturdy tree and could have belayed a Hummer. True professional.
This time last year, Ben Dixon led a 5a in Railay Beach, Thailand. He was too excited to write down its name. He has since been sport climbing and top-roping in the South of England and France, and would love a DMM rack to kick-off his trad career.....
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