Another great day at Crazy Horse yesterday, culminating in a failed onsight attempt on Blood, Love and Steel (6c+), the crux of which I fell off half-a-dozen times. Two consecutive on-off moves on paltry sidepulls and woeful smears. When I finally bagged the moves I was frazzled with a combination of airtime and climbing in the sun all day, and felt too pooped to haul up to the anchors. Josh II, who is 6' 1" and has an ape-index of about +6, simply reached past the crux and cruised on up. Bah! As for me, I'll just have to come back next year...

Singha, Leo and Chang beer was variously consumed in some quantity by the Crazy Horse International Climbers Drinking Team last night, in which an impressive performance was put in by the Norwegian contingent.

Now it's just a couple of hours until I board a Laos Airlines flight to Luang Prabang. Should be interesting...

http://www.mountainbikingchiangmai.com/downhill.html#trip4

Some more stolen images from the link above. Had a totally brilliant day downhill mountainbiking on the forested slopes above Chiang Mai today. About 1200 m of descent, mostly on quite technical singletrack. A big group to start with, we peeled off with the main guide into a group of 5; me, two personal trainers from Newcastle who work in Dubai at a sports club for rich people, a large American who seems to run this particular outfit, and a local guide; to do this route, which took about 4 hours. Plenty of stops though. Everyone fell off several times. The most sustained singletrack ride I've ever done.

But still, the most dangerous bit was getting back to the rental office in the Chiang Mai rush hour - well scary, especially as the most common form of transport, the scooter (which often has whole families aboard) vies for position relentlessly with cars, minibuses and tuk-tuks, there don't seem to be any rules of the road, and no-one takes much notice of traffic lights (even if they work).

Climbing at Crazy Horse Buttress, 50 km from Chiang Mai. A good day was had by all, including today's random partners Josh II, Arizona Kevin and myself. Somehow I forgot my camera, so here are a few pics courtesy of Chaing Mai Rock Climbing Adventures, who I'm sure won't mind.

One of these routes I led today - The Gatekeeper (graded F6b locally, but a crack climb, and consensus 5.8+ or hardish VS 4c for anybody brought up on handjamming). The other two I did last year. All excellent.

Caught myself yawning quite a lot today, still under the insidious influence of jetlag. But not quite as sleepy as the giant pandas I saw yesterday in Chiang Mai zoo. I don't think I've seen pandas in the flesh before. Despite the koala-esque demeanor they adopt when munching their bamboo leaves, they are basically big bears with impressive claws and teeth, and I suspect they could swipe your leg off and bite you to bits within seconds if they felt like it. As could Thai boxers...slight, barely-muscled men moving barefoot on tiptoe who could kick seventeen colours of living shit out of you at the mere suspicion that you might have the vaguest notion of considering ever dropping a hat. I watched some of the weekly Monday-night show last night: blink and doof-doof-doof-blam, you've missed a knockout.

Chiang Mai, northern Thailand

Passport stamped 26 Nov 2006: exactly one year since I last entered Thailand. Jumped on a plane to Chiang Mai, found a guesthouse in the centre of town, and slept all afternoon.

In Bangkok airport they were just opening up the shops as I wandered from international arrivals to domestic departures. I had about 2 hours to kill, and needed a coffee. The coffee was good, and I went to pay at a till near the exit.

The cash-till woman was engrossed in an eleborate doodle on a small sketch pad, and was completely lost in her own thoughts. At first, I didn't realise this, and thought she was totting up an urgent bill or something, so I said nothing and waited. My flight wasn't for an hour, so I wasn't in a hurry. As her sketch grew, it became obvious that her hard pen-work was a distraction that disguised something that was occupying her mind, which was elsewhere completely: maybe thinking about her boyfriend, or sick mother, or unpaid bills, or boddhidharma, or whatever people think about when they are filling in time between tasks in the job they get paid to do.

I stood for about 30 seconds, the comedy of the situation growing with each passing moment. Her colleague on the next till noticed and said something in Thai. My till-woman looked up, registered a sort of self-conscious surprise and gasped in apology.

"Why you not tell me?!" she says.
"I though you were busy" I say back.
'No, no, not busy! Sorry sorry!"
'That's OK, there's no hurry!". We both smile, she embarrassed, me a jet-lagged tourist who was doing a job at a desk, in front of a computer not so very different from hers, less than 36 hours ago in a town several thousand miles away in a different culture on a different continent.

You know it when you read something written by someone who's had the same experience as you...'Towards the end of this dive and in just 6m of water we came across one of the most impressive and memorable things I have seen whilst diving - a ball of jacks spiralling from 6m to the surface. There were simply thousands, their silver bodies flashing as they twisted and caught the light from the surface. At one point they were actually spiralling around us encasing us in a giant swirling, living sphere. This is something I will never forget and what we didn't know at this stage is that the very next day we would find ourselves caught in an even denser ball, with even more jacks and this time with white-tip reef sharks circling the perimeter at a nearby dive site called Turtle Patch. The photographs I have of this phenomenon in no way do it justice and by no means illustrate the enormous number of fish involved, so it's lucky I videoed it too! This can now be seen on the Turtle Patch page.'