Oriental Rock
The
Hot Rock wagon rumbles north from some fine climbing in Malaysia to find paradise.
Boud, now a seasoned veteran of the Hot Rock campaign, takes up the story.
Sport climbing paradise! Not only do the limestone cliffs around Ton Sai beach and Rai Lay beach offer some of the best quality climbs in the world, it also has the best walk-ins and the best bars with the best cheap cocktails to celebrate your achievements! These were the reasons to leave the truck parked in Ao Nang for 5 weeks and enjoy Ton Sai life.
Of course, if you stay such a long time in one area, you get strong, really strong. I think that almost everyone climbed at least 2 grades higher, setting new personal records, whether they were climbing 6a’s or 7c’s. We also joined in one of the more recent developed activities in Thailand: Deep water soloing. Merry showed us that he is the bravest of all hobbits and jumped of a cliff 30 meters above the sea. He then discovered that the water is quite tough if you hit it at high speeds, and the next 3 days or so he could not sit down normally because of a bruised tailbone!
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During
our stay in the south of Thailand, the group also grew to 29 people. 15 of
them joined in a big group ascent of Humanality, a classic 6 pitch route that
starts pretty much in the last bar of the beach. And because we were with
such a big group, and the sun comes onto the wall at 12:30 and we didn’t
want to bother any other people that wanted to climb the route and because….
Well pretty much because we thought it was cool; we climbed the route at night!
We started at 4:30 in the afternoon. At 6:00 the people that lead the group
enjoyed an amazing sunset from the top of the 5th pitch. By 8 pm the wall
was covered by little dots of our head torches and it took till 2:30 am for
Gary, who was the last person, to get down. The next day, Mark and Pippin
showed that Hotrockers can climb fast as well. It took them 56 minutes to
do the whole route, ground to ground: a speed record for Humanality. 
In a place like Ton Sai, time flies and there are always more routes that you want to try and you could always spend more time there. However, we chose to travel around the world, and we only have 3 years(!), so we had to move on. Our next destination was Bangkok. Great place (not!) we love embassies (specially the Pakistani embassy, not!) and the traffic is so smooth (NOT!). Anyway, I’ll leave writing about Bangkok to Fi, because I’m sure she can tell a much nicer story about it ;-)
The next place we went to was Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand, is the second biggest city in Thailand. It's a lot nicer than the biggest one, more chilled out. It’s the capital of Songkran and the Thai new year festival centres here which is also known as the biggest water fight in the world. When I first heard that, I thought, well we’ve seen carnival in South America and that was a big water fight as well. Now I can safely say, carnival in South America is nothing compared to Songkran. If you’re armed with the biggest water gun you can find, you are nothing. During Songkran, people use buckets, and everyone joins in! During 5 days, the city streets are more like canals. Anyway, we were not in Chiang Mai just for the Songkran festival, we were also there to climb.
Just outside town is the Crazy Horse buttress with about 70 routes in all grades. It is all very new, so no slippery polished holds, but sharp rock, sometimes even too sharp to hold. Most rock is vertical, providing nice technical face climbs, in stead of the general steep jug pulling of the south. We spend just over a week in Chiang Mai and then it was time to move on to more unexplored areas: Laos.
Of all the countries in South-East Asia, Laos is the least developed, also climbing-wise. Not only is there not many developed climbing areas, if you try to find any information about them you’ll come across various stories about the bureaucratic hassle of getting climbing permits, varying from it being a piece of piss to it being a very time and money consuming business. Luckily we started the procedure early, giving the company that can arrange the permits enough time to apply for them.
Our first destination was Vang Vieng, a small backpackers town not far from
Vientiane, the biggest city of Laos and probably the quietest capital city
in the world. What attracts the most travelers to come to Vang Vieng, I don’t
know. There are a few small caves to visit, you can float down the river on
a oversized inner tube (which I think is very exciting if you do it with a
group of 18 drunk Hot Rockers, but otherwise quite boring). Unless you’re
a climber. Then it is worth to stop for a few days if you’re passing
through and explore the three small crags that are there. The crags offer
a variety of climbs of different quality, although generally the routes are
quite dirty due to the lack of traffic.
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The second destination was an area just north of Luang Prabang, near the
Pak Ou cave. This was one of those areas that were a big gamble, since we
didn’t know what to expect. We had some information about there being
13 routes, put up 5 years ago, but we didn’t have a topo. So it might
turn out to be crap and you want to get out of there as soon as possible,
or it might be brilliant and you’d like to spend weeks there. Luckily
it was the latter, but 
unluckily,
we could only spend two and a half days there, because we had to move on to
China. So we spend our time camping on the river beach, climbing the existing
routes and putting up a few new ones as well, while being closely watched
by the curious eyes of the local villagers.
The next few days were spend driving down the most scenic roads through northern Laos and into China. The problem with scenic, winding roads is that they are often very slow, especially with a 20 ton truck. This resulted in 4 truck days in a row, where at some point it took us 4 hours to travel only 100 km. However, we’re in China, one of the most interesting countries to travel in, even more if you have your own vehicle, so I’m looking forward to more adventures, hopefully including lots of climbing! The big red truck entered China and developed loads of stuff that will be in a story form on the site soon.
