I’ve been trying to put into words how I feel about Ton Sai. It’s incredible here. The water is warm, the views are spectacular, the rockclimbing is amazing. One of my favourites was a 6c (5.10+?) I led at Thaiwand Wall that was over 30 metres. It finished with a giant stalactite at the top looking over the ocean with all the islands in view. I wish I’d had my camera. I at least had my eyes.
The limestone stalactites are breathtaking and humbling. There are huge pockets both on them and on the rock faces, and when you can’t find a good hold you just have to look harder.
The fact that I lost about 5 lbs from being sick for a day and a half means I’m light as a feather—too light. I’m strong again now, having recovered after what was a long, painful night, muggy night, and a day of not leaving my bed. Walking was beyond question. I made a valiant effort to sit up once. That didn’t work out.
But then you start feeling better, and the world seems lighter, and the sun comes out, and you see smiling, friendly faces, and you stand up without getting dizzy and having a horrible headache, and you’re happy you’re through the worst of it and hoping it’s really over. Because you have to be careful until you’re really sure.
Everyone foreigner gets sick here. Jorn, a Norwegian climber who comes every year for a couple months, says it’s a water-born pathogen or parasite or virus. But he hasn’t been sick in a long time. The island accepted him. Or maybe his immune system was just more adaptable.
My body is not forgiving. It doesn’t adapt well.
I take the emotional train of thought and think that making everyone sick is how the bay tells foreigners to leave—you don’t belong here, it says. This is independent of physical fitness and emotional positivity. Even after getting sick once you can get sick again three weeks later; you pay your dues a few weeks at a time until either the bay accepts you or it doesn’t. Even annual travellers don’t necessarily become immune—Jorn being the lucky, Norwegian exception.
Yet people do come back. Xavier, a French climber, helps with the Thaitanium rebolting project. He’s been fine, I think. Alan, an American who worked his way through Kashmir where he was violently ill and all through India before coming here, hasn’t been sick once. He’s probably paid his dues enough for a lifetime.
Russ, from Utah, teaches IB drawing and painting in Beijing, and shows no sign of getting sick either. He, too, has already been hardened off. His wife has not.
I left Ton Sai a couple days ago. I originally planned to stay another week, but If I got sick again, there’d be no one I could count on to take care of me. My roommate, another climber from Montreal, wouldn’t be there to bring me oranges, give me some gravol and motrin. I wouldn’t want to be sick in a bungalow full of cockroaches and mosquitos by myself. I do want to stay longer with people I’ve met, but I don’t dare push my luck.
I was trying to put into words how I felt about the beautiful, menacing bay when a line finally popped into my head. And it was exactly that:
“The forest is lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
-Robert Frost
What I love most is the middle clause, “And I have promises to keep.” To me the sentence isn’t just about the forest being menacing, but about personal responsibility—what my dad would feel if something happened to me here. If I got sick and couldn’t stand up and ran out of water and no one knew where I was for 3 days. If I didn’t get better. It’s neither likely nor unlikely.
As the climbing guide says, there has never been a helicopter lift from Ton Sai. You leave by boat. People have died. As much as I want to stay and climb and explore, my stomach and my heart say go.
And I do have places to go before I sleep—both in terms of this trip (Malaysia, Vietnam), and it terms of my home in Montreal and the rest of my life. I love the ambiguity and grandiosity of the sentence. You can take it on a small scale—a traveler in a woods with just a couple of actual miles to go before he’ll get to sleep for the night, or a life’s path where death is a respite and getting there may not be full of sunshine. But if you know another Frost poem, you’ll know that choosing your path makes all the difference. So I’ll choose wisely.
That’s how I feel about Ton Sai.
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