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Nancy Hansen’s Awesome Trip to Southeast Asia for Sport Climbing and Travel

This past winter, Ralf Dujmovits and I enjoyed a sport climbing and travelling trip to Southeast Asia for two months. With the exception of the last five days, we climbed only at lesser known and/or new areas and had a fantastic time. The climbing was fun, it was warm, but not too warm, the food was amazing and the rest day adventures were hard to beat.

When Ralf suggested we go on a two-month climbing trip to Thailand and Laos, I cringed, thinking of all the bad reviews I’d heard. Thailand has the reputation of being a beautiful country with really nice people and great food. But I had heard many say that climbing there was way too hot and humid, the rock was polished to a glassy finish and it was overrun with gazillions of tourists. Luckily, before I said no, my usual life philosophy kicked in. “How bad can it be?”

Nancy Hansen in Koh Yao Noi. Photo Ralf Dujmovits
Nancy Hansen in Koh Yao Noi. Photo Ralf Dujmovits

The 55 days of the trip were nothing but fantastic. With the exception of the last five days, we climbed only at newly developed and/or lesser known areas in Thailand and Laos. There were countless excellent routes at all the grades we wanted. Southeast Asia’s solid and highly featured limestone is characterized by tufas, face climbing, roofs, caves, pockets, cracks, tufas and more tufas.

Everywhere we climbed, we found unpolished rock, lower temperatures, lower humidity and fewer tourists than in the famous Krabi/Tonsai area where we spent our last few days. Only occasionally did we sweat out a litre of water in the course of a single route, or find a warm-up that had seen a bit too much traffic. Early starts, shade and liquid chalk were key to the climbing joy we consistently found.

Nancy Hansen climbing in Crazy Horse. Photo Ralf Dujmovits
Nancy Hansen climbing in Crazy Horse. Photo Ralf Dujmovits

The cultural experiences, wildlife sightings and rest-day activities in this part of the world are unique, memorable and abundant. We visited dozens of Wats (Buddhist temples), petted elephants, had our feet chewed on by hungry fish, hiked around beautiful waterfalls, shopped at vibrant markets, explored caves, swam in clear blue rivers, observed the plentiful wildlife, talked to monks, participated in a spectacular lantern festival, rode in tuk tuks and generally found some kind of new adventure everyday.

Nam Pha Pa Yai, which is two hours north of Bangkok, had the best-ever approach to a sport climbing crag I had visited. A two-minute walk through the jungle, a 20-second zipline across the river and a final 15-second walk. We slept in a tent on a bamboo platform that (mostly) kept the many jungle creatures out physically, but not audibly. The early morning jungle music was beautiful. The climbing was varied and fun on good limestone. There are only a few dozen routes there, but the unique experience it offers makes it well worth a stop for three or four days. We then left for the Crazy Horse climbing area near Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.

We stopped to check out many temples, Buddhas and random beautiful statues. We saw a lot of wildlife in Northern Thailand and were really surprised that we only had a single incident of finding a creature inside a pocket on a rock climb (a bat). We did get stung by bees a few times. We saw a number of big water monitors, adults are normally two metres long. On one occasion, two dogs raced up to “attack” a lizard, but it stood its ground and lashed out with its tail. When the dust settled (literally), we realized that the dogs did not come within two metres of the lizard. I suspect this was a daily game between the three.

"Here is Ralf, 'enjoying' an extraordinarily spicy soup. An occasional meal was so hot that my mouth swelled up and I could no longer speak because of the pain." Photo Nancy Hansen
Ralf Dujmovits enjoying spicy soup. Photo Nancy Hansen

Bees were probably our biggest objective hazard while climbing. Not all the nests were this big and obvious. We both got stung and/or had to retreat quickly when we realized the route passed by a bees nest. We heard stories of climbers getting too close to large nests like these ones and receiving hundreds of stings, resulting in a fast trip to the hospital. Bring your EpiPen if you visit.

There are many big and harmless millipedes cruising around. Ralf woke up one night with a smaller one keeping him company on his side of the bed. Luckily, most snakes in Thailand are not poisonous. We certainly kept our eyes open for the poisonous ones – king cobras and vipers. We spent 12 days climbing at Crazy Horse. It is a perfect destination for a couple of weeks of climbing and sightseeing. The shortest approach was two minutes and the longest was 20. You can climb on any solar aspect and even climb completely inside big caves.

Ralf and I were really lucky to be in Chiang Mai during their spectacular Loi Krathong festival. It is celebrated on the 12th full moon of each year. It is considered good luck to either float a beautiful candle lantern down the river or float a large, lighted lantern up into the sky. There were tens of thousands of people from all over the world participating in this colourful festival. The Chiang Mai airport is closed for the afternoon and night because there are so many lanterns in the sky.

After returning our rental car at the airport in Bangkok without a single scratch on it, we flew to Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, on the border with Laos. Our destination was the “rock climbing resort” called the Green Climbers Home just a few kilometres inside the Laos-Thailand border, near Thakhek. In 2010, German climbers Tanja and Uli Weidner went to Laos to check out the potential for new rock climbing areas. They were so impressed that they quit their jobs back home and simply stayed.

Nancy Hansen climbing in Koh Yao Noi. "Climbers rarely go to Koh Yao Noi because the approach to the climbs involves a one-hour 'four wheel drive' scooter ride and a half hour walk. It’s completely worth it." Photo Ralf Dujmovits
Nancy Hansen climbing in Koh Yao Noi. Photo Ralf Dujmovits

They built a camp for climbers in the centre of an amazing collection of crags. Thanks to their efforts and those of visiting friends, there are now more than 300 routes. If you prefer slab climbing, don’t go there. If you like highly featured, steep, 3D climbing, go there. The routes in the cave below were really confusing – we frequently called down to each other to ask which way we were supposed to go – left, right, backwards, forwards, sideways, etc. Every direction felt like up, but it was really “out” (of the cave).

The Green Climbers Home offers a few accommodation options – you can rent a tent, dorm room or private bungalow. Tanja, Uli and their friendly foreign and Laotian staff serve three great meals a day for very reasonable prices. The approach to most crags takes between two and ten minutes. If you want to go really crazy (and be completely alone), you can walk 20 or 30 minutes. The temperatures and humidity were much lower than anywhere else we went on this trip – a couple of times we had long pants and Primaloft jackets on all day. I highly recommend a visit. We stayed at the Green Climbers Home for 16 days, but I wish it had been at least three weeks. With a longer visit, we would have (gladly) taken a four-day break in the middle to do a popular round-trip motorcycle tour that sounds like a great adventure.

Believe it or not, there is a 5.10b route in the cave. It is called Saugeburt (German for Pig’s Birth). You have to climb through a two-metre long, narrow horizontal hole in the middle of the route – hence the name. You can have a long nap while you are lying in the hole, but the crux is getting turned around and escaping back to the steepness! One of my favourites.
A 5.10b called Saugeburt climbs the cave. Photo Ralf Dujmovits

We headed to southern Laos and Cambodia for ten days of travelling that would take us through Christmas. Our first stop was Pakse where we rented a scooter to check out the Bolvean Plateau. Our next stop was Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia. A friend who climbed and travelled for a year spent three non-climbing weeks in Cambodia. Since he said it was one of the very best parts of his whole trip, we had to go. I had heard of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and the genocide that took place in Cambodia in the 1970s. But that’s about it. This is not the place to go into details, but let’s just say these people suffered unimaginably.

For decades. They were at war before Pol Pot, then 1/3 of their population was tortured and murdered by Pol Pot, and then they suffered more war for the next ten years during which hundreds of thousands of land mines were placed. It was a really emotional part of our trip. Ralf and I alternated between being completely disgusted by humanity and being completely amazed and inspired by the resilience of humanity. In retrospect, visiting Cambodia was my favourite part of the trip even though we did not climb. To know what Cambodians have been through, and to see them now – amazingly friendly people who are working their butts off to bring their standard of living up – was super inspiring and good for the soul.

At the end of our truly exhausting 10 days of travel, we spent 30 hours in taxis, on buses, in tuk tuks and on a longtail boat to get to the magical island of Koh Yao Noi, nearish to Tonsai. We went to Tonsai beach for the last five days of our trip. Many single-pitch routes are polished, but the multi-pitch climbs are fantastic. I recommend that you don’t go between mid-December and mid-January – the crowds are horrendous.

Nancy Hansen and Ralf Dujmovits. Photo Ralf Dujmovits
Nancy Hansen and Ralf Dujmovits. Photo Ralf Dujmovits

– This post originally appeared on The Alpine Club of Canada’s blog (link). Nancy Hansen is an accomplished Canadian rock and alpine climber and an ambassador for the ACC. She was the first woman to have climbed all 11,000 ft peaks in the Canadian Rockies. Follow her on Instagram here.

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