The Beach

“Goddamn hippies” –Eric Cartman

“Deep water soloing: Gathering potential energy incrementally until you have enough to make it hurt like a motherfucker when you fall and hit the water” - Bencyclopedia

Put the lime in the coconut

The past few days I've spent in Hat Ton Sai, a little town which straddles both the beach and the jungle, and is known as something of a hippie hideaway. This hearsay is quickly substantiated for travellers when they step off the boat and walk ten feet in any direction, as the sickly-sweet smell of quality home-grown is bound to drift up from somewhere. And here I was thinking that travellers in Thailand would be pretty careful when it comes to drugs, as everyone knows that the prison sentences are insanely long and the conditions appaling. Then again, maybe it’s just me who's too obsessed with these risk/reward calculations. There are also heaps of rock-climbers here, since apparently the limestone cliffs that surround the beach make this one of the top climbing destinations in the world. I have to admit, it is pretty spectacular with stalagatites melting off the face of the cliff so that it looks more like a creepy Gaudi-building than anything natural.

I hadn’t climbed for about eight years, but decided to try my hand at something called deep water soloing anyway. This is basically climbing without ropes, but on cliffs hanging over deep water so that the falls don’t hurt (as much). It’s great fun, and the lack of a harness really does give an extra throb of adrenaline. One little slip can send you plummeting, and hitting the water in a weird position even from under ten meters can feel like a spade to the gut. Mind you, one of the French guys in the group jumped from close to 25 meters and later remarked that he effectively got an undesired enema when he hit the water, so I guess things could always be worse. Actually now that I think about it, I don’t know if an enema can ever be anything else than undesired. Probably not.

P. S. I don’t know what it is about The Killers, but often the weirder a song sounds at first, the more I like it after a few listens. This is probably my fave off the whole album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP4Xu6a1F90&feature=related