Swiss Miss and Representin Deutschland YO!!

A month on the road, and not regretting it a bit... not like I ever thought I would....
So after a very quick stint in Bangkok Manfred and I flew off to Hong-Kong, beginning our longe Superman S shaped journey through China, if all goes well, South, Shouthwest, East, NorthEast, Northwest...
We met up with Manuela, another aquisition by Manfred's ad in some travel magazing that suggested travelers to join us at various parts of the journey.... do I sound sceptical? Well I am a little less now after we are 1 for 2... Manuela is cool and a good travel companion for our trip through China since she speaks Chinese at about the same level (say 2nd grade with a learning disability and a heavy stutter :) than I do, so we are double tackling those chinese railway stations talking to the girl behind the counter while Manfred blocks off the pushy crowd of anxious and impatient chinese that would very well crawl underneath your legs and pop up in front of you trying to snatch a ticket....

Train Tickets: cheaper than an ice cream at a touristy spot in downtown Zurich and harder to get than a front row seat at the superbowl... you have to literally beg borrow and steal, and without persistance there is always going to the local chinese foregin travel office and paying the extra 50% on the ticket so they will do it... but what about honour?? Seriously... I have spent five months in China in 1998 and therefore must be able to buy a ticket by now... so here is how it goes.... you say blablablabla the ticket lady says "mei you" (we dont have it), you say blablabla and something else the ticket lady says "mei you"... you say it (phrase #1) again and she starts realizing that you will probably just stand there all day saying it again and again.... meanwhile Manfred is too bulky and good of a blocker than any of the chinese can run through and stuff money on the side of the little window to buy tickets.... so she gives up and actually looks up all possibilities and you end up wiht a ticket... AMAZING!! Now I am really not making fun of the Chinese of the system, I love the lines, the haggling, and the train rides themselves.. but nothing there comes easy that s for sure.


HongKong in the smog...

So Hong-Kong was pretty good, but a bit anticlimactic after Krabi.... the good part was we got to fly business since the plane was super empty and china air choose to rather let the five dirty funny looking tourist fly business than the well dressed chinese... weird but hey I did not mind!
After buying an altimeter watch and doing my first substantial amount of haggling in chinese we climbed the Victoria Peak and walked down to Aberdeen and took a Songchow (funny looking boat) for a spin... Manuela joined and we took off to Guangzhou to travel onwards to the famous Guilin/Yangshuo (just like Aberdeen/HongKong yet another scene from the Tomb Raider 2 movie coincidentally!)....

Along the way I had a chance to talk to a 23 year old very pretty chinese girl during the 18h train ride.... hey, brushing up on my chinese can be easy on the eyes! :)
Truly though those long train rides in sleeper compartments are the best way to relax and learn some chinese.... the chinese are very curious about the foregin travellers and not shy at all about asking all kinds of questions once they figured out you speak even just the littlest bit of chinese...
So on that same train we met Vi and Monica, not usually very big deal, we meet plenty of travellers... who would have known that these two germans would follow us (or we them!) for a long time!


Cycling in Yangshuo...


Kormoran fishermen use the birds to get the fish out...

They both are finishing their degree in Germany in Chinese and Business.... funny, now poor (or lucky!) Manfred ended up travelling with four bloody foreginers (Vi is Vietnamese and can slightly pass for chinese at times) that all speak chinese.... needless to say funny situations occur like that when we are in stores or restaurants.... it comes wiht the gigantic advantage that we pay the chinese not tourist price wherever we go, we eat at local inn's and hole in the wall restaurants where they have never seen or spoken english language, and the food is better and much much cheaper.
Monica taking a picture of Vi, Manuela, Manfred and I having "Baozi" for breakfast, a massive amount of vegetable and meat dumplings for 5 cost about 30 cents per person...



Yangshuo is phantastic, set with limestone sharp hills with plenty of vegetation surrounding the Li river they are a perfect backdrop for tourists to relax, rock climb, bike, or take trips up the river by boats... unfortunately this backpacker haven has already been discovered by the mass tourism and now (4 years, later, I was there in 1998 with my ex-wife Theresa) there are a lot more "tourist cafes" and resort style hotels.... however there is still plenty of room for cheapo backpackers like us too....

Bouldering wiht the local climbing guides












Typical limestone formation along Li river

Of Lion King, Babes in Thailand and Genghis Bond

These names, my friends are not just ramblings of the sun-fried, curry overloaded and beer withdrawn mind.. they are what we so eagerly try to tackle and redpoint these days here at raylay bay.... still not understanding me.... ok, let me back up a bit....

Thai fisherman bringing us to the penninsula...
I met Andrea and Jan ten days ago and they have become great friends in no time, particularly Andrea who is the quintessential travel buddy and climbing partner in so many ways... Jan is a bit slow at times but an exceptionally strong climber so we spend a lot of time waiting for him to get ready while climbing a few routes to warm up or just smoking too much... my cigarette throughput has triples since I ve been climbing, due to the fact that everyone here seems to smoke....
Ok, refocusing here to try to tell the story.... Raylay Bay, incredible, an absolute paradise for climbers.... for 50 thai bath (roughly 3 dollars) a night we get our own bungalow and food is no more than a few dollars a day, for fantastic Thai food, incredible.
So this is what we do pretty much every day.... sleep in, get up, have a very tasty "museli", the cambodian girl that takes the breakfast order sure does not know how to spell "muesli" but it sounds so much better that way :)


Lunch: Sticky rice in bamboo canes is the best!


Bored? Well lets bury Roger in the sand... cant climb 24/7

End result...

So a big old muesli with plenty of exotic fruit and soy milk for the sore muscles, then off to explore another climbing area, intermitten lunch from the guy with the bamboo canes filled with sticky rice, a bit more climbing and then laying at the beach with a cold beer, playing guitar or going for a swim.... it can't get much better than that. They don't call Raylay Bay the southeastasian bermuda triangle for nothing... travellers have been planning to spend a few days there and ended up staying there for weeks, months, even years... no joke!

On my way up to Genghis Bond, 6b


Yeah you guys are the coolest...





The climbing here is OUT OF THIS WORLD... a couple of pics will hopefully document that....
I am now climbing in the high 5.11's (or 6c/c+ for the rest of the world) and that gives me a fair amount of choice here, the routes are mostly overhanging (see below Jan in Tidal Wave, 7b), and have "motorcylce holds" but still one needs a fair amount of technical skills placing the feet, and a good chunk of power....

Jan in Tidal Wave, 7b, and plenty of admirers....

Since I have started climbing I have transformed my exceptional tiny upper body into something like a climbers upper body, not too big but fairly muscluar, and I like it.. it does not require powders and shakes, just plenty of training which comes natural here, 5-7h of climbing is no exception. I have been working on Lion King (6c+) all week, and am pretty close to finally redpointing it, these projects are cool, and Lion King is close to our quaters so we can just walk over to go and try it one more time in the evenings...

Lion King (6c+), close to the top, trying to hang the rope...

A week ago, after climbing for about 7 days Jan and I decided to join another austrian climber and do one "big wall" climb, which essentially is only 4-5 pitches here, but still when you are about 300 vertical feet above the beach where everyone is laying out sunbathing or having a coke at the restaurant IMMEDIATELY below, it gives you a bit of a funny feeling... below is a picture Jan shot immediately across the bay from where we climbed.... if that is not the classic Krabi/Raylay climbing picture, nothing is..... there is actually a climbing route (5 pitches) that includes a vertical tube one has to climb through to get to the top... NICE!
Time passed quickly, spent climbing, bouldering, getting 3 dollar massages (1 full hour!) at the beach by thai women with years of experience, nothing better after being sore from all the climbing....


Outch! Nice! Outch! Nice!... repeat...


Jan and I on a 1/2 day multipitch mission to the highest point out there...


View from the top...

Lots of time was spent enjoying the delicious Thai food and hanging out with fellow climbers at the few bars that were open (it was officially raining season, though it barely ever rained during the two full weeks spent there).


Dumbass drunk try (included a couple of concussions) to climb around the table without hitting the floor... yeah right!

Last night came for me, it onward to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland to travel to the northwestern asian countries, and it was hard to say goodbye.... since I did not want to leave without a big last bang we decided to go to one of the bi-monthly big parties at the other side of the island, where drinks are huuuuge (though they cost almost 10$ they come in gigantic buckets and several straws that everyone can join in!)....
It was a wild night I wont forget so quickly, saying goodbye to all the friends I made, most I will never see again but I am sure Andrea I will, we became great friends in just two weeks time and without her this climbing vacation would have been less than half the fun...


A bucket of MaiTai... hey it was my last night! Jan looks a wee bit drunk.

So I left, took a 20+ h sleeper bus to bangkok where some israeli girls were incredibly obnoxious and would not shut up yapping through the night, thanks to my MP3 player I got some rest anyways looking back at Raylay with a smile, knowing that i had just spent two of my greates weeks in my life there....

North by northwest

So we have left the Cameron Highlands and have made our way through Malaysia travelling North by Northwest to Penang, where we spent a couple of days visiting temples and hanging out at the beach. The highlight was riding around with a rented 80CC scooter all over the island exploring, not necessarily the safest but certainly the most fun!

So we have come as far as Krabi in Thailand, and Manfred and I are about to split up for a couple of weeks, has been planned for a rather long time. Manfred is going onwards to explore the few places in southeast asia he has not visited yet, Cambodia..... not that I am not intrigued by a country so different in its history than the peaceful Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, but it will have to wait a while. My friend Michael Eglin introduced me to rock climbing about 2 years ago and I have gotten quite nuts about it over time, spent several weeks in Italy and France, and many weekends in the Swiss Alps, not to mention the 100s of hours in the climbing gym. What better thing to do than to go to THE climbing mekka in asia, Railay in Krabi.....


Exploring Pulau Lankawi...

The how was harder than the where really, but with a bit of initiative and luck this is how it panned out.... wrote a note on a climbers website asking for climbing partners, hoping to find someone that will bring the heavy rope and quickdraws out there for me to use... funny enough the people that answered were Andrea and Jan from Austria, and Andrea has family in Switzerland so she was able to bring out my rope and draws for me.

It's a Man's World....

I am not a sexist... sorry, I really am not... I was raised to treat men and women equally, have no problem buying tampons for a girlfriend or crying a little when watching poor Leonardo die on that wooden door.... but for a few days now I feel extremely annoyed by the other sex... what happened? Not sure, I started traveling with Francis and then Claudia joined us in Pulau Tioman. The whole thing started becoming a Boy vs. Girl thing, shopping vs. hiking, tanning vs. hanging out in restaurants... carrying around half your belongings vs. traveling with bare minimums... yours to figure out which belongs to who, but I all of a sudden could not wait for Manfred to join the travel. Now this is the skinny in a nutshell... went to Kuala Lumpur and ditched (or got ditched, mutual) the gals the night before Manfred arrived... the thing that I feel bad about is that he was supposed to go traveling with the gals while I will be climbing in Krabi next month, but oh well.

Anyhow, we left KL immediately (he s been there before) and made it up to the highlands. Since then my heat rash has disappeared (it is a moderate 20Celsius here every day) and we have been hiking plenty, spending most evenings drinking beer at the hostel and talking to other travelers... much more my style than spending hours in aisian shopping centers "looking around".

Yesterday we hiked almost 6hours up the longest and steepest trail to the top of the highlands, and followed several miles of tea-plantations down to town, an incredible sight. The humid environment and constant temperature are an ideal ground for these plants and they are cut to the perfect size for the workers to pick the leeves, as seen in the pic. At night they had a big go away party for the cook of the hostel, and man did they! They roasted a big ole pig and we sure took advantage of having burned 1000s of extra calories!


Yum!

Happy Birthday ole Switzerland

So it is 1st of August, I am enjoying my chicken chow mein while drinking a coke and streching my legs, overviewing the beautiful ocean, stereotypical of what swiss do on our national day, ...NOT! Strange, but even though I have only travelled for a week now I feel quite far removed from cell aspiration, cleanroom etching, protein labelling and paper writing... and have settled into what is going to be my life for quite a while.... this does not come without speedbumps.. I seem to be rather unpopular at the moment with my two fellow travellers (picked up another girl through manfred's dorky travel idea... way too long of a story to be told at this time... ), differences in opinions of ways to travel and live are blown out of proportion when you spend 24/7 together.. anyhow, we ll figure it out or split, easy as that..

That s the smaller of two evils, the latter being a hot rash from sudden transfer into tropical environment that keeps me from sleeping EVER... well I think I have slept a few hours in the last few nights but its hard to say...

Anyhow, EOR, we have been exploring the island and done a rather gnarly trek throught to the other side of the island (monkey bay) where we then decided to get a boat ride back...

They even let Frances steer the boat... girl's charm always works...


Still life...


Beach relaxation....

The island is full of wildlife even tough its no more than a few square miles... there are tons of quite annoying (and potentially dangerous) monkeys, and we saw a gigantic geko (think very very elongated cat or dog!) and apparently there are cobras as well though I d rather not see one, figure i have plenty of time chasing down animals that can bite, strangle or eat me alive...