Been spending the last few days on a whirlwind of non-stop adventure. The friends I’m with are just super adventurous in general. I used to think I was adventurous until I met these guys. I’m definitely not. Or at least a different type of adventurous. I’ve just been trying my hardest to keep up with all the climbing and caving.
Can’t say outdoor climbing’s very easy for me. Everything hurts. My hands, my feet, my body getting scratched up in general. We’ve been climbing on jagged limestone so my hands can barely handle the pain even with them all taped up. Also, I was dumb enough not to pack anything but shorts so my legs look like a bloody mess. The climbs were a little frustrating since I’m a little rusty but a cool experience all-in-all. I really liked having so many holds at my disposal (as opposed to the limited options of indoor climbing). With the rocks, I kind of narrowed down my choices by seeing what’s within reach and what didn’t hurt my palms too much. Only did a couple of climbs before my hands gave out though.
I’m currently warming up by a camp fire and drinking some Beerlao somewhere in a small remote village called Nong Ping in Laos. We’re spending a couple of nights here. No wifi. No service. It’s a village in development so we don’t even have hot water or flushing toilets. We’re just spending time around our only heat source, enjoying each other’s company. We went kayaking through a big-ass cave today. 14km big-ass. Xe Bang Fai Cave. Been in the dark with just a headlamp, rowing pretty hard for about 8 hours so my shoulders and back are definitely going to be sore tomorrow. I definitely wasn’t used to being being cold, wet and dirty for so long but as always, I did my best to tough it out, especially when the we were deploying such amazing teamwork. I hope the cut on my foot isn’t infected as it’s been in contact with guano water all day… There were a lot of cool rock formations and bats to see but the best sight was seeing all the stars in the backdrop, bordered by the mouth of the cave as we were coming back out. I have to say that I did one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done in my life during this excursion: Asian-squatting and eating fried rice in pitch black somewhere in the middle of a cave.
Speaking of which, I think I’m putting on a bit of weight despite all these activities. I’ve been doing a lot of stress-eating and my body is definitely not used to this amount of carb intake. Really missing my Western diet right now. ?
On the positive side, I’ve been able to sleep these past few nights even through crazy village-wedding music playing all night long.
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The ride out of the city and back were 3 hours+ each way and the driver only had about eight songs or something so we had to listen to those over and over again for a while. This was one of the catchy and memorable ones: