Railay Bay

In the morning Kelsey and I were going to do some rock climbing.  It had been years since I had last attempted it, so I was pretty rusty and needed a bit of review.  Our first climb was a bit over 30 meters high, and I kind of wanted a warm up climb, but oh well.   Kelsey made it up just fine, and it appeared easy enough.  Though, looks were deceiving due to her proficiency in climbing.  I got to the top, but that last little bit was extremely slippery, and the limestone rock cut into my hands in places.  The heights didn’t bother me, but my form was terrible.  The next climb I killed what was left in my arms and felt like I had just done 75 chinups.  The final straw on my next climb was when I fell and ripped a good hunk of skin off my fingers.   My hands weren’t in shape for this sport, and it was so incredibly hot that I sweat off all the chalk.  The next few difficult climbs I sat out on and cheered Kelsey on.  She was really good at it, and impressed a few of the guides.

 After that outing I grabbed my camera equipment and wanted to walk through the caves again to grab some more photos.  There were significantly more mosquitoes following me this day, and I brought a huge cloud of them inside with me.  A few bats kept buzzing past inches from my head and would snipe a mosquito that was orbiting around me.  Within a few minutes, all mosquitoes had been annihilated.  Awesome.

I felt the need to take some more photos since it started to cool off outside.  Mike and Kelsey went to get pedicures and I wandered around the area taking some shots of an incoming storm.  Just from the look of the clouds, I abandoned all hope of remaining dry by the time I got back to the hotel.  Sure enough, the palm trees swayed and folded up as the warm blast of wind and rain knocked into them.  My camera safely inside my bag which was mostly waterproof, I made my way back and was thoroughly drenched head to toe.  I changed into dry clothes and we decide to check out some other parts of Railay Bay.  We followed a path to some other rock formations and found a possible slippery trail that might have led to a lagoon, but we weren’t going to try it out.  Instead, we stumbled upon a  wonderful beach that we didn’t even realize existed in the area.  There were two or three people there, and the entire beach was deserted.  There was also a random shrine with many phallic symbols inside which was curious, but we ended up walking down to the end of the beach playing in the sand and rocks along the way.  It would have been fun to spend more time playing in the water, but none of us felt like getting sticky with saltwater at the time.   By the time we returned, there was a local restaurant branch of our resort that was hosting a BBQ with various fresh fish.  I got a white snapper, and it was alright I suppose.  I enjoy salmon better.  We chatted with a friendly waiter for a while who gave us some explanation of the caves with all the phallic symbols, even htough his English was difficult to understand.  He was nice though.  We left and started to pack our things, but exhaustion set in, and I was asleep within moments.