Chronicler-Pilgrim Tells a Tale (or two) of Uncertainty and Exposure
In another edition of Old Meets New, I reflect upon past travelogues from Southeast Asia and South America
Dear Reader,
The Christmas holiday is fast approaching and I already find myself with limited time to invest in quality writing. So this week I’ll be looking to past-Charles for help, and then I expect I’ll take the following week off.
Bear with me a moment as I pat myself on the back with a bit of a year-end-review.
I’m of the opinion that the most important thing at this stage in my growth as a writer is the number of published pieces. This will be the 28th piece published in The Mast Year this year.
This is a big deal!
I have tried to get this project started on at least two prior occasions in the past ten years. Each other time I only posted two or three pieces before letting my discipline lapse.
In contrast to that, twenty eight might as well be the moon!
Plus, The Mast Year is only half of the story. I also write a second substack called Jiu Jitsu Field Guides that I started at the exact same time as The Mast Year. I’ve written thirty pieces for the field guide, meaning I’ve written 58 pieces in the year of 2023!
Thank you for your interest and support in this project.
I put a lot of myself into my writing, so every like, share, subscription, and comment has an outsize positive impact on me. You do a little thing, but it feels like a big thing to me.
Now, without further ado, past-Charles.
-Enjoy
Travelogue: December 21, 2014, Tonsai Bay, Thailand
There is no road into this place. Perhaps that’s why I came here.
The romantic in me likes the idea of a place that can only be reached by boat. But this is no island, just a small peninsula, hardly significant with respect to the scope of southern Thailand. If it’s not an island but there’s no road in, what keeps this peninsula from being developed like all the other beach towns nearby?
Mountains!
Seems as though the primordial cliffscape illusion cast by the Bangkok apartment blocks was a premonition and not just a fantasy. The real thing surrounds me now.
Limestone spires tower and loom, covered in opportunistic vegetation and dripping stalactites. The landforms throughout Thailand’s Andaman coast exemplify some of the most dramatic karst geology in the world. Carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere combine to make carbonic acid, a very weak acid really, but strong enough to dissolve calcium carbonate, the prime constituent of limestone rock. This process is replicated throughout the world and can be observed in the mundane such as old gravestones weathered into illegibility, or the immense as is the case with the vast networks of caves of the Cumberland Plateau. In the vastness of geologic time, these cliffs were once the coastal sea floor. Uplifted, then eroded, they now dominate these shallow seas from above.
The internet was no longer young in 2014, but the social media influencers hadn’t yet fully reshaped tourism. Still, Tonsai Bay was already legendary, if a little bit lacking in detail. I think I first read about it in a magazine, maybe Rock & Ice. I was able to find a few more details on an obscure website, somebody’s personal blog post talking about having swung through while in the area.
That was it.
I knew where it was. I knew I wanted to go. I didn’t know how I would get there.
In retrospect, my trip to Southeast Asia was chock-full of grace.
. . .
The ferry pilot successfully failed to kill anyone on the Sangker River passage from Siem Reap to Battambang. I still can’t believe they run a boat that big on a river so small. But damn if that pilot didn’t know his way around the throttle.
There’s a beautiful thing about public transit, if you have the mind to let-go. There was no way I could influence whether or not the pilot would wreck and kill us all. Only once an accident had happened would I be able to spring into action and have an influence on my own fate and the fates of those around me. Until then, nothing to do but let the need to take responsibility roll right off of me like water off the back of a duck.
So I laid out in the sun on the roof of the ferry, backpack for a pillow, and marveled at the landscape flowing by, so different-from my Tennessee home.
. . .
A day later, I was comfortably sequestered in the back of a passenger van, headed to Bangkok from the Cambodian border, playing cards with two young Frenchmen and a Canadian. Turns out they had also heard of Tonsai Bay, it was on their agenda too, though maybe not with the same priority as me. They intended to live it up in Bangkok for a bit before heading south.
The van dropped us in a part of town that was explicitly not tourist-facing.
It was big. It was foreign. And I was unprepared.
Lucky for me these three knew where to go in Bangkok. Without them to serve as impromptu guides, well, I don’t want to dwell too much on what alternative I’d have had to default to.
We got a taxi to Khaosan Road, and I loitered there for a day before hopping on the night train to the Andaman coast.
A pilgrim is in need of his defining action, his pilgrimage.
Last we heard I was sleeping away the day under the watchful eye of a giant stone Buddha, recovering from too much fun the night before [I’ll re-issue that story someday soon]. Could I have simply floated to my next destination on my raft of stone? Is there some secret power imbued by the masons of yore? Would that old Buddha have granted such a miracle?
Such magic would indeed be tempting. But I could not bear to simply dream away the journey, waking just in time to arrive.
How much opportunity to learn would be forfeit, how many sights would go unseen?
My senses would dull from want of exposure, like the astronaut whose bones go soft for want of impact.
To wander is to be willing to get to know where you are.
This sentiment reminds me of a story that I love to tell, a story of a different adventure in a different land. This story is a bit self-aggrandizing. I don’t know how to tell it any other way. But it also contains an important truth, a truth about the beauty that can be found in exposing yourself to uncertainty.
Six years before Southeast Asia, I was in Coyhaique, Chile, looking to head north and east to San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. I had been participating in a wilderness leadership program for the past two months and our “class” was dismissed for three weeks of Christmas break. I had only one thing on my mind: get as far away from my peers as quickly as possible. They weren’t bad people, but we’d been in really close quarters for a really long time. So I looked at the map, found a mountain pass with a through road, grabbed my backpack, and started walking north out of town.
This is definitely another story of grace. When I look at my route on the map in this present moment, I’m amazed that I expected to get from Coyhaique to Futaleufu (262 miles) with just my feet and my outstretched thumb, much less all the way to Bariloche (another 223 miles).
I caught a few rides in the early part of the day, and when there wasn’t a ride to be had, I walked.
Sitting on the side of the road waiting didn’t suit me.
By early afternoon it’d been an hour or two since my last ride. I was walking along a rather hilly section of gravel road in some forested highlands when two truckers stopped to offer me a ride. They were going north, at least as far as Puerto Montt, I forget exactly, but they’d be happy to drop me at Villa Santa Lucia where they were sure I could get a room for the night before heading east towards the border tomorrow.
Well they were wrong (and my expectations were naive to begin with). We rolled up on the crossroads in the middle of a very dark, very rainy night and there might have been one light on in the entire town.
I was not about to start knocking on doors in the middle of the night, asking for a room with my “in case of emergency: break glass” level of Spanish language proficiency.
So I thanked the truckers, wished them well, watched their tail lights fade into the gloom, and began to look around for an impromptu shelter. There turned out to be something of a bus stop adjacent to where they dropped me, a three sided shed-like building with a dirt floor and a canted roof that was weirdly low, maybe sixty inches at its highest point.
The floor was muddy, but the rain wasn’t actively intruding into the space. I found a bunch of cobbles in a nearby ditch, rocks in the rough size of footballs or basketballs. I shuttled enough of them into the shelter to make a raised platform, laid out my closed cell foam ground pad, placed my sleeping bag on top, and proceeded to sleep like the rocks upon which I lay.
. . .
It hadn’t occurred to me to notice in the night, but the morning twilight made it apparent that the open side of my shelter faced the mountains to the east. I was awakened to what persists as one of my top-5 sunrises. The rain had passed in the night, leaving just enough clouds in the sky to create visual interest, scattered scraps of canvas to be painted by the rays of the sun as it climbed over the mountains and shone down upon my surprisingly sufficient shelter.
Invigorated, I packed up my gear, returned my rocks to their ditch, and set out on the east road. I thought about stopping in town, trying to find some breakfast, but it was very early and the need to move was upon me.
Rides were hard to come by that day, so I walked much of the way to Futaleufu, and the next day, I walked across the border into Argentina.
But I digress.
Solo
Air fills the void through which I fall
into the open arms of the water below.
There to dive and to visit the realm of long lost relations,
teleosts, cnidarians, and nudibranchs,
wearing their coats of colors never before seen.
From lofty cliffs
to luminous depths,
I dance along the knife’s edge.
Ropes need not apply.
I love to climb. I hate to jump.
If friends wanted to cliff jump at the lake when I was in my teens and twenties, I always preferred to find the hardest way up the cliff and was content working out the climbing problem while they over-lapped me, taking the easy way up and then the easy way down.
So when I hopped on a day-boat from Tonsai Bay out to a nearby sea stack, I decided pretty early that the jump point wasn’t for me. There were perhaps eleven of us: eight tourists, three locals. I didn’t know anyone before that day. All the tourists were young, like me, most were even younger, late teens or early twenties. I was the old man at twenty seven. The young men and women alike scrambled their way up the cliff to jump from a ledge thirty or forty feet up.
Not me.
I climbed all the way up. Looked down. And opted to climb back down.
There was a partial-zero chance that something would go wrong. The water was crystal-clear, beautiful, deep. No hidden obstacles. No outcrops between the water and me.
I just don’t like jumping.
It’s the climbing that gets my attention. I had deep-water solo’ed before, and that’s why I was there today. I don’t need to be forty feet up to feel the freedom of climbing without a rope, of knowing that the water will catch me, embrace me with its warm buoyancy.
And the diving!
Our sea stack cliff face didn’t have a proper reef beneath its feet, but it had aquatic habitat nonetheless. I think I am much more willing to go down deep without an air tank than I am willing to go up high without a rope.
Breath-hold diving and deep-water-solo climbing, the two most romantic of pursuits.
I measured my deepest dive of the day in the neighborhood of forty feet down on a single breath. Far from any record, but perhaps respectable for a land-lubber. So I spent that trip exploring the challenging climbing problems in the lower thirty feet of the cliff and then introducing myself to the fish forty feet below while my hands rested.
A grand total of seventy feet of elevation change on the day feels respectable. Just don’t look too closely at my math.
Lo, I am but a pilgrim.
Humbly I have wandered,
at times forsaking
food, shelter, sleep, and certainly
my American perspective on personal space.I have come here to climb,
to pay homage to this land in the purest fashion I know,
stripped down
to the barest of elements.
You have had some amazing adventures! And a knack for sharing it in writing. So glad you’ve had success with The Mast Year, and I’ve enjoyed following along :)