They used to call me 'spider'.
(Because of my tiny arms)
For the sake of saving some cash, I decided to skip professional climbing beginners’ lessons and instead asked a fellow—who claimed to be familiar with vertical practices that include ropes—to be my partner.
It turned out that he was as good at climbing as he was bad at teaching it;
When I, blessed with a good amount of survival instinct (read: fear of heights), successfully reached the top rope ring thing, now ready to travel downwards, he and me realized that it would have been better to train the act of ‘sitting in the rope to be lowered down’ (a.k.a. ‘letting go of a nice, firm grip and preparing to fall to a dead certain death’) at about 1m height first.
It turned out to be okay, though, after I couldn’t cling to the wall anymore, slipped, hurt myself, but somehow managed to survived.
Plus, at the end of the second day, I started to get used to it.
On the third day I left on a newly purchased 4th-hand-motorbike with a broken second gear, looking for new challenges.
Boris Pink in Thakèk, Laos, on February 7th, 2012
