panorama from under the Tonsai wall (climber on Cafe Andaman to the left)

Tom Grundy's Climbing in Asia 2010 Travels Page

The main reason for the trip to Asia was to rock climb, mainly on the Railay peninsula in Krabi, Thailand, but also at Batu Caves in Malaysia near Kuala Lumpur. This page isn't anywhere near done, but I am posting it up to get some momentum going.

Thailand

Krabi province features a lot of karst limestone rising up from the beach or jungle. We mostly climbed right off of Tonsai beach where many of the climbs featured tufa and stalactites on steeply overhanging rock - Julie's favorite flavor. We also climbed at a number of the nearby areas including the Thaiwand Wall, the Cat Wall, etc. However the beach was such good climbing and so convenient we mostly went there.

Here are a few pictures of my last project "Pet Mak" (very spicy). I worked on this a fair bit the last week, and even managed to climb through both cruxes, but I fell at the top on the last hard move. Sigh. I wish I could give it another try without having to travel half way around the world. Most of the pictures don't really show how steep it is.

Jeff just fell off the first crux - this shows how steep the start is

The bat-hang rest on Pet Mak

Jeff on the first crux - this sort of shows how steep the middle is (same place as the next pic)

starting the first crux on Pet Mak

continueing the first crux on Pet Mak - I fell here a lot

moving into the upper mono crux on Pet Mak

Travis on Pet Mak

The local Thai climbers often had routes ruthlessly wired, and provided good sports action with their dynamic style when they climbed in the evening.

Thai climber going for it at sunset

Thai climber falling

Thai climber high on a route

Jenny visited us one extended weekend to climb, and she wrote about it on here blog here:

Malaysia

We decided to go to Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur to climb at Batu Caves. Eventually I'll get some of the pictures from that up, even though there aren't a lot. The climbing was good, but it wasn't that extensive and it was logistically difficult and the weather wasn't so great (afternoon monsoon rains), so we bailed on our KL-BKK Air Asia tickets and returned to Tonsai for more climbing.

We finally returned to Bangkok where we stayed at Jenny's wonderful house before another marathon flight back to LA and finally another train to Flagstaff for me.

the view from the Thaiwand Wall of Tonsai and Railay beaches

a sunset from Tonsai

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