Kevin's blog

Today I witnessed something some people never see in their lifetime. But let’s play the day through from the beginning 

First, I woke up at 5:30 am to watch the sunrise over the mountains during a “morning” hike it did not disappoint, through I was super groggy the entire time.

It was cool to see the fog over the mountain tops.I really like the third one. I think I’ll make it my phone background.

Next was our kayaking adventure! We kayaked for about 4ish hours on these inflatable kayaks. There was me, a girl named Joyce from Holland, and a group of 4 Texans in their mid 60s.

The group of Texans was the most pleasant bunch. Ill be honest, I thought they’d be a bit conservative and closed.minded considering Texas, but they were the most open minded accepting people! And they had that wonderful southern kindness. They just had great stories and humor.

One of them was an environmental lawyer, and tod a story about how he had to write a will for s guy who ran a canoe shop for 30 years and amassed a bit of wealth. Apparently the guy had never married, and upon hearing that he was writing a will, no short of 6 of his long terms girlfriends came out of the woodwork and started fighting amongst each other to a portion of his wrath. And here was our Texan friend caught in the middle of all the drama, previously unaware of the girlfriends, just trying to write a will ???. 

Anyway, it was a oleasure to spend the day with them.

I ended up being in a double kayak with Joyce(who was also very nice and entertaining). I didn’t take any pics because I forgot my gopro and didn’t want to risk my phone, so here’s some pics from hers:

There were a few maybe class I rapids we had to go through. At one point I almost smashed into a log that was at face height; if I had hit it I’d definitely have gotten hurt. Luckily I dogged it at the last moment by laying down in the kayak while trying not to fly out of the boat.

We kayaked 6km in all. All in all a bit dull, but relaxing trip; I wish there had been more rapids 😉

Next, we took a little detour after kayaking to look at a local cave. Here’s some pics of it:

There was this sick-ass river running through it that was too far to reach, but which our guide had previously guided. He told us a tale of how 3 people he was guiding almost passed out from oxygen deprivation, and he had to carry all their shit out on his own. 

Here’s a pic of the river. It’s a bit hard to see:

Caves are dangerous people! Don’t mess around if you’re unsure about something.

Here’s some pics of me standing in the entrance. Look for the blue shirt 😉

On our way back, we took the opportunity to climb a few of the trees on our way back and got some silly pics:

However, the tree gods didn’t Ike this, and they came back. With a vengeance. And tried to murder us.

That’s right. A tree almost killed us.

*Crack crack crack* we heard in the distance. We thought nothing of it.

Then like a gunshot, we heard a giant *CRACK*. We look into the distance, and about 100 m off and we see the leaves at the top of a bunch of trees moving. Then suddenly I realize the leaves are moving TOWARDS us. WTF IS HAPPENING my brain thinks. Simultaneously my brain thinks, “oh shit the forest is exploding” and “should I run?” but I’m dumbstruck by this giant leave moving force I see in the distance. I then realize it’s a fucking giant ass tree that’s falling over, headed right for us. I worry a bit that it’ll be Ike a domino effect and knock all of the trees over in front of us and hit us. Luckily that doesn’t happen. The approx 70 ft tree with a diamater of about 2 ft came down about 30 m in front of us, and stayed still. It lay across a small little gully, as well as laying  on the path that we were just about to cross. If we hadn’t been lollygagging around climbing trees, it very likely could have fallen on us.

Now what prompted it to fall? It’s anyone’s guess. There wasn’t a strong wind, or an animal, or an earthquake. It just came down for no reason.

Anyways, here’s some pics so you can get a scale of the tree. I didn’t get any video of it falling as it all happened so fast.

Me walking across the obviously rotten and unstable newly fallen tree.

Our guide also grabbed a large “log” out of the newly fallen tree to make a gamer handle, but unfortunately it was too rotten to create anything out of it:

Here’s a video of the first responders on the scene lol.

On the way back I took some pictures of ants, which I thought was cool. They’re freaking huge here in Thailand.

And here’s some views on the truck ride back.

What an adventure. I wonder what adventures tomorrow will bring.

What a day.

It started out with me waking up at 7:30 to catch my 8:30 bus to sappong. Unfortunately I missed it, so I had to take the 11:30 bus. I spent the morning shopping and buying gifts for people, as well as stuffing my face with food.

Finally we get on the bus and we’re on our way. This time my luggage is actually on the bus I’m on, rather than another one going the same way(which happened the day before). I was certain I would somehow miss the bus with my luggage and never see it again. Luckily that never happened, but I’m not letting my backpack get on a vehicle that I am not on in the future. Drivers schedules be damned.

Anyways, I finally made it to the cave lodge. Shout out to Tyler Gary for recommending this place. As soon as I stepped in, I knew I would have a good time.

Here’s a pic of the common area

And my dorm bed:

The owner, Jon, is a bit of a legend. He’s a caving master who is the unofficial guide and guru of the 200+ caves around this area. He also wrote a book, Wild Times, which describes everything from his caving adventures, to building the cave lodge(twice! It burnt down once), to being accused of murder. Thrilling guy and thrilling book.

Anyway, I get here, and I’m just itching for some adventure. So I look around, and Mr.spies has got a few “treasure maps” on the wall describing a local cave. Here it is:

Its called big knob(which I can relate ????), so I decide to go for it.

So I’m following the map, pretty easy going so far, and I finally get to the part where it says go through a cornfield. Basically trespass through someone’s crops. I felt a bit uneasy about it, but I go ahead through the fields and come upon the second fence; at this point, the adventure turns fun. A cute lil dog comes out of nowhere, and jumps through a hole in the fence, which leads to an obvious path. I assume this is the way to big knob, so I go ahead and follow him.
And this dog means business! He leads me for a bit, going onto the trail. Eventually he stops, and I’m sorta guessing we’re not on the right trail, becuse it’s small and hard to follow. I’m guessing a missed a turn somewhere, and after about 20ish min looking for the correct trail, I follow the fence and find the obvious path.

After this its smooth sailing. Cookie(as I later found out he was called) is just running up the trail with ease; he’s hopping up on rocks twice is height, navigating cliffs like they’re a breeze. What a talented dog!

Here’s a pic with him after I gave him a treat for taking me to the top:

Great dog.

And here’s the view from the top:

But the adventure is just beginning. I walk around the top of big inob, and stumble upon a geo cache! Unfortunately the pen was shot, so I couldn’t write anything in it. Here’s a pic of the cache. If you’re going up there, bring a new pen!

Then I remembered Jon said there was a cave up here. So I looked around, and sure enough I found one:

This is the entrance. Near the back of this first cave there was a hole that you had to get on your hands and knees(but really.judt your stomach) to crawl through. So I do just that and emerge in another mini cave. Here’s a pic of the hole:

On the otherside there is a small hole that a decently sized human could fit through. I had a suspicion it led somewhere, but being a bit closteophobic, and being on my own, there was no way I was going down it. Here’s a pic:

Besides this hole, there was another obvious cave. I lowered myself as much as I could, but even with my rock climbing skills I didn’t see an obvious way to get back up from the ground floor of the cave if I jumped all the way down. I later learned from John that there is a way, and it’s easier to do with 2 people, but I remained unconvinced. He also said that is were the cave “starts”, so I’m a lil bummed out I didn’t go all the way down, but better safe than sorry. Anyways here’s some pics. First is a pic of the cave floor I was too scared to jump down to.

The above is the entrance to the second part of the cave I climbed down. The next pic is of the cave in its entirety:

Anyways, during this time, Cookie was barking and whinning; I guess he thought I slipped and fell or something. When I eventually emerged from the cave he was gone 🙁

Here are some injuries i sustained during my adventure:

The rest of the day was fun as well. When I got back to the cave lodge, we had a giant Xmas dinner(it was Christmas). Everyone at the lodge was invited. I met a bunch of cool people, had some drinks, Facetimed Molly, and read a bit. The feast was delicious, and day 1 of my cave lodge experience complete. Today I was “mcShit”. 

Merry Christmas y’all.

This was an action packed day.

Today we decided to take an uber out to Crazy Horse(the climbing area), rather than the shuttle provided by the climbing gym. We did this because we didn’t want to wake up at 6:30 that morning.

This would prove to be our undoing, as well as add to our adventure.

We went ahead, ate breakfast, bought subway for lunch(I know, I know) and headed out.

We decided for the first climb, we would do a 4 pitch climb in the cave we oh-so-love. We already had done the first two pitches the day before with the instructor, but today we were gonna finish the job.

The first two pitches went uneventfully. Sean took a little long to setup the anchors(someone Sean, it doesn’t take 15 min to set an anchor). Then I lead the next two pitches.

We didn’t know how long they were or anything about them(as they were new and not in our book. But the third pitch was wonderful. It was 30m with about 18 bolts. I had to reuse some of my anchors to make it(as I had only brought 14). Here’s a pic of me and Sean hanging from the top of the third pitch:

This is about 170-180 ft up from the ground. We’re just “hanging out” ???.

Because of Sean’s incident on the first day, I made sure to check all his anchors and make sure to ask he’d locked all his carabeaners. We didn’t have any accidents this time thankfully.
Here’s a picture looking down from the top of the third pitch:

That white dot on the wall is the top of Sean’s helmet.

Finally we did the last pitch, which was only about 10meters. It was very stemmy and fun.

Here’s a picture of Sean climbing through the hole at the top of the pitch:

Finally we got to the top! I thought being near the top of the cave was rewarding, but this was just as nice if not better.

Here’s Sean sitting at the top of the route, sitting in front of the cave hole:

And some selfies looking out on the landscape!

This is by far the coolest climb I’ve been done, and I’d go so far and say it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done. 

After that, we decided to do one more single pitch at another location. That was cool too. The pics are on my GoPro, but I didn’t download them.

Next we headed off to a hot springs to get picked up by a bus to drive us back to Chiang Mai. It was 5km away, so about an hour walk. On the way there, we picked up a dog that started to follow us! He was so cute.

Heres a video not of him, but another couple dogs at the crag. There are a lot of stray dogs in Thailand; I’ve probably seen 30-40 st this point. And they’re all cute ?

The dog followed us for about 2-3km. A good 30ish minutes. 

However! At one point, 3 dogs approached us and our doggie. I could smell trouble brewing, and I tried to scare them away. But it was to no avail. The three doggos surround our dog, like SURROUNDED him in a circle. Then one dog went in to attack, and our doggie retreated. They then followed suit and chased him a good 50 meters down the road.

That was the end of our trip with doggo 🙁
Finally we got to the hot springs, and trouble started: the last bus back to Chiang Mai was at 6, and it was 6:12. I thought the last bus was at 6:30. So now we’re stranded.
There are no rooms left at the hot springs, and we tried calling taxis/ubers, but nobody will come out this far.

The sun is down by now and we have no were to stay. Sean’s freaking out.

I look on booking.com, and see there is a Japanese hot springs with a room available for $69 about 1km down to road. It’s a queen bed only however.

I call the reception, and luckily someone picks up. I don’t know what it is about Thailand, bit 75℅ of the time people either don’t pick up the phone, or the phone number listed is wrong.

Anyways the lady picks up, we tell her we’ll be there soon, and we make our way over. We were lucky because reception closes at 6, and she happened to be by the phone.

 Its dark by now, so I pop in my headlamp(with the flashy red light in the back!) And we walk over.

We finally get there, and after a strained conversation trying to figure out if we can call a taxi from there and/or get 2 beds for our room, we resign to getting one bed and walk into the room.
Here’s a pic of it. Very romantic 😉

Luckily we had really good accommodations. There was a mattress in the closet, and we put that on the floor and I slept on that. The bed itself was really hard and uncomfortable, just the way Sean likes it.

This is when our bad luck turns into good fortune.

This place, being a spa and all, has a mineral bath area! So me and Sean head in down. Luckily it’s open, and we get to have s private mineral bath free of charge! Here’s what it looks like:

And then it keeps getting better! Across the st, in the middle of nowhere, was a KARAOKE bar that served food! So great. So we went there, had a couple of big changs, ate some food, and watched the locals sing. They didn’t have any English songs unfortunately.

Here’s a video of a local/owner singing.

What a day.

Yes I know a lot of my NZ photos didn’t upload. However, the WordPress mobile app is a POS when it comes to uploading photos. If you can’t upload them right then and right there, there’s no option to retry. 

So I’ll probably not fix those photos, because it’s too much of a PITA. Sorry.

Today Sean and I took a lesson from an instructor on how to do multipitch climbs.
We started out working in the ground, practicing our knots and how to transition from belayer to climber. 
We also learned some subtle things, like how some quick draws have a rope side and a bolt side.

We learned how to belay from an anchor, we learned (well relearned cause we were taught once before) a clove hitch, which is incredibly useful.

I had never belayed from above, so that was surprising for me.

After that, we lead a multipitch inside a cave. I don’t really have any pictures of that as I was paying attention. We rappelled down that one which was a lot of fun.

We then ate lunch and did our second multipitch. The service to get to the crag is great; they give you a ride there and back, as well as a lunch, for 450 bhat(about $13).

The whole time during the day the instructor kept teasing Sean for messing up things(forgetting to lock carabeaners, not putting a stopper knot in the rapell, ect). I thought it was funny(him being teased, not him forgetting vital things). Sorry Sean :p

The second pitch was really cool. It was outdoors, and we got to climb above the treetops. I led the second pitch, which was a 6a+, or a 5.10a. This is the highest I had led. It was pretty hard cause I was a bit nervous being so high up. Apparently I cut up both my knees, and I didn’t realize until I had anchored in. There was a bit of blood dripping down them. Guess I was concentrating too hard to notice :p

 Here are some pics from the top of the second pitch.

During the evening we went to a night market we saw on our way into town and ate their. It was great and delicious. I got pad Thai for the 1000x time.
And now here we sit in our hotel, drinking beers and planning our next outing tomorrow.

Today Sean almost died. He was setting up a rapell for a climb, and instead of putting his sling THROUGH the belay loop, he put it around. He had put his whole weight on the sling too. He called it the “pinch hitch”.

I just happened to notice it, and said “uh is that sling right?” We quickly realized it wasn’t, and I grabbed a sling, girth hitched it around his belay loop, and locked a carabeaner into a bolt. 

Here’s where we were. He was attached like I was, with his whole weight on a sling, and no rope. 

Thing of putting a rubber band around a finger, and only the friction of the rubber band on the finger keeping you alive.

Anyways he didn’t die. But that’s the closet I’ve ever been to someone dying. For some reason I wasn’t that scared, and as soon as I saw the problem I clipped him in with a sling.

I learned 3 things from this:

1) Always put your slings through both leg loops, rather than a belay loop. This makes it redundant and harder to fuck up.

2) Always anchor yourself into your anchor system with 2 loops rather than one. This may seem excessive, but it’s all about redundency. You can use a sling or PAC or rope with a clove hitch. Use any combination of the two.

3) Buddy check when possible. 

Anyways, besides that incident, the day was really fun. We did some lead climbs in a cave(see the pictures), I did a rapell down a 60m cave on my own(2 pitches), and ate a bunch of food. I’ve got GoPro footage of the rapell which I’ll put up later.

We also went to the hotel bar where we were staying, and were the first customers for the new bar! The manager took a picture of us and posted it to his fb tagging us, which was kinda funny.

I drove down from the hostel

el, and on my way to Queenstown this is what I saw. Pretty beautiful tbh.

Im currently on my way to the Nevis bungy jump and swing. Im a bit nervous, and I’m hoping I don’t throw upy breakfast(which consisted of 2 sausage egg McMuffins, a hash brown, and some fries).

I just downloaded the WordPress app which should make it easier to write and upload blog posts. We’ll see how it works. More to come later.
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Just finished the jump. I did both the bunje jump and the swing. the bungee jump was a lot scarier than I thought it’d be! Jumping off a platform is hard to do when all your senses are telling you not too. Pics to come later. Here’s some photos to hold you over in the meantime:

Now it’s time to go back to Queenstown and get some ice cream. Maybe do some laundry as well.

This was a travel day. I love NZ airports; there’s NO security. Just walk on through.

I finished the last 3 miles of my trek, then took a bus to Nelson. It was pouring rain right as I finished, luckily for me. Here’s some pics of the last few miles:

Then, I rented a fucking car. Crazy. And I drove it, in the rain, in the dark, on a twisted mountain road, on the wrong(left) side of the road for an hour to my hostel. I made a mistake and booked a hostel that was 20 min away when I thought it was an hour away.

Stupid fucking weka ate my dinner. It was my fault for leaving it under my tent enclosure, what did I think was gonna happen.

One of the meals is completely gone, the other has a beak sized hole pluked into it. I could probably eat it, but who knows what weird animal disease I’d get. Plus it’s hard to cook it now that it has that hole.

Luckily tonight is my last night, and I’m catching a bus at 11:20 tomorrow. And the walk tomorrow is only 3ish miles. Then it’s a 4 hr bus ride to Nelson, but hopefully there’ll be a stop before then for food.

I’ll probably be running somewhat of a caloric deficient, but I’m not gonna starve. It’ll just be kinda shitry tonight.

Until then, I get to enjoy a new food invention — gummy trail mix! It consists of gummy worms and trail mix. Here’s a pic:

Also today, while I was climbing over rocks and exploring the beach side, I came across a sleeping seal! I was singing and humming to myself when I stumbled upon him and he didn’t hear, so he must have been passed the fuck out. I took a couple pics with him. Here they are:

Then I decided itd be a bright idea to wake him up and see what would happen. So I “clapped” and his eyes opened, and he looked at me with that groggy “i just woke up” look, before he realized I was a scary human. Then he flopped away from me in a hurry to a respectable distance, before deciding it wasn’t worth sticking around and went back into the ocean. Hopefully I didn’t scare him from ever sleeping on those rocks again 🙁

I guess the weka eating my food is karmatic payback for waking up the seal.

Anyways, at the beginning of the day I did a river crossing. Here it is:

Also during this day I visited “separation point”. They put fake fiberglass birds there along with a speaker maling bird sounds in am attempt to get a certain species of bird to settle there. Here’s info and some pics:

..as well as some bonus photos.

​I burnt the ever living shit out of my scalp and face. That’ll teach me to go kayaking without applying sunscreen.

(It’s very burnt)

I went kayaking from onotenopiat to bark bay. It was really fun. We went around an island thhat had a bunch of seals on it. We even saw some dolphins, which the tour guide said was lucky.

They didn’t allow single kayakers, so I was in a double with an older gentleman from Montreal. He was nice.

Because of the logistics, I ended up not hiking a 4 mile part of the trails today, and 3 of the 6 miles I did home were without my giant backpack. That’s because I basically took a water taxi to onotenoia, kayaked to bark bay, and then walked back to onotenoia. Because of that I got to leave my backpack at onotenoia. Those few miles without a backpack were bliss.

Today we walked through a bunch of sandy areas. It’s outrageous how much the tide changes here. There’s literally boats just stranded in the middle of the sand. The tide can rise as much as 14 meters. That’s 42 ft!!! For the places I’m hiking it looks like it’s dropped 4-5 meters throughout the day.

Again. My face and scalp hurt like hell. I’ll be putting in sunscreen religiously for the rest of the trek and wearing a hat. I think I’ll start wearing a hat more in my day to day anyways.

There’s lots more thoughts I’d love to share, but it’s such a pain in the ass to type them out. Maybe I’ll be more in the mood tomorrow.

There’s a river crossing I have to do tomorrow. Low tide is at 8:21 am. I’ll probably leave around 8ish as I have 10 miles to do tomorrow. At a dencently slow pace of 2 miles an hour and a 1 hour brunch break, I should be in by 2. Don’t know what I’ll do with the rest of my day but we’ll see.