Thailand-Ton Sai-The Nest (Day 43)

I’ve been trying to sweet talk the hotel manager that we are honored guest but haven’t got him sold yet.  Work to be done…  We headed over to Ton Sai for some climbing which meant a long walk to Railay West or the jungle path from Railay East.  We’d been down the path once in 2007 and remembered it as the jungle but wanted to checkout what it was like now.

The jungle path was wider and nicer than I had remembered.

However this guy’s 8 ft wide web at head height across the path reminded me we were in the jungle.  Reference it was about the size of my hand.

We weren’t sure how hard to push on Ton Sai for grades especially since it might be even more sandbagged than Railay but when Anja saw Dozer Days 6c+ (~5.11c) she had to give it a shot.  The section above was really good, very steep but with good holds and well placed bolts.  Awesome.

The upper section however got really slippery, sloppy, and hard.  The steam to the stalactite was real cool but some real hard pulls with some awkwardly placed bolts.  After following pitch 1, I was toast and turned all the leads over to Anja.

The second pitch was pretty cruiser with a few balancy moves and brought us to this lousy hanging belay off slings outside a little cave.  I crawled in and it was kind of slot canyonesk.

The views out of the cave of Thaiwand Wall and thai people burning trash were pretty good.  Opps, we messed up the belay was really another 5 meters higher.  Much nicer ledge to relax on and take the shoes off.
Anja headed up the third and last pitch of 6a+.  I got to stand there and watch the monkey’s show off.  I watched two funny things; first a band of monkeys (about 10) ran across the roofs below, one at a time on each roof, each running across about 3 roofs I could see.  They’d run across the first roof then climb on some branches, run across them to access the next roof, run across the second roof, then leap a 5 ft gap and grab a tree trunk then leap again about 3 ft from the tree trunk to the third roof which they ran across out of sight.  I watched about 10 monkeys on the roof then crash – cowpow!  I couldn’t see what they were up to but it sounded like trash was going everywhere.  Then the craziest thing this monkey which was sitting on a brach which stuck out about 30 ft from the climb at about 300 ft above the ground starts shaking his branch and screaming at the other monkeys.  Crazy, damn monkeys.

I followed the third pitch and lowered back to the belay ledge where Anja had belayed from and two raps and we were down.