Thailand Oct 27 2013

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Oct 27 2013
Today is our rest day so we could be well rested for the next day, the day that we go deep water soloing. Since we did not want to do any climbing we headed over to part of the Ao Nang peninsula that we had not seen yet called Ton Sai beach. Over on the Ton Sai beach there is more places to stay and more restaurants, but it is not quite as touristy as Railay West and East. There is also lots of climbing over is this area as well. We had learned a few days earlier that there was a few different was to get over to Ton Sai beach. The first one we heard about was a 30 minute walk along a jungle path, the second one was along the shore line as long as the tide was out or we would have to walk through the water. The last option was a short walk on another jungle path but closer to the water. The path was up hill pretty quick and then down hill real quick that ended up at the North end of Railay West Beach. Since we got up too late to catch the low tide and the short path near Railay West beach sounded hard, at least the way it was described to us, we decided to take the longer jungle path. It was not quite as long as we expected it to be but it was the longer way to get to Ton Sai. As we were walking along Ton Sai beach we could see so many different routes with people on a few routes here and there. We watched a few different people climbing. The two people we watched were climbing over hanging 5.12s and 5.13s, it was pretty amazing to watch. We continued down the beach to check out a few more routes and ended up running into an American guy named Andrew that we had met the first day that we got here. He was about to get on a 5.11 when we showed up, so we decided to stick around and watch him. So Andrew decided to lead climb the 5.11 and started off pretty good and was able to make it to the first bolt with no problem. At this point he decided to take his first of many breaks. So Andrew is about 22 and has a little bit of a smaller frame then I do and probably weighs a bit less then I do. As he started off it appeared that he was going to have no trouble with the route. The holds on the route also appeared to be pretty big, so again I was thinking he would be alright. So Andrew continued on to the second bolt and again rested and continued to rest and looked around at holds and continued to rest. He then continued up the route and made it to the next bolt after a little bit of a struggle. Once he clipped that bolt he rested again and then continued on toward the next bolt. He got up to where his head was even with the next bolt but had an awkward foot placement which hindered him from being able to clip the bolt, so he ended up falling a good 10 feet. When falling he ended up coming down and landing flat footed against the wall, but hit the wall pretty hard and he instantly yelled out in pain. He then wanted to be lowered because of the pain. Sam R. and I ended up kind of carrying him over to the closest bar so he could sit down out of the sun. We left him there with some other folks and went off and had some lunch. After lunch we came back to see how Andrew was doing. He said that he had talked to a "doctor" and they looked at his ankles and said that one may have been broken and the other may have been sprained. I don't believe that he had a broken ankle, because he was able to put a little bit of his weight on it, but I am no doctor. While sitting there talking to him a bunch of people starting looking up and yelling encouraging remarks. Andrew told us to go out onto the beach and watch. So we all went out onto the beach and looked up. All of a sudden someone had jumped off a very high cliff above us and in a matter of seconds his shoot opened and he landed safely on the beach.

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