For the sake of saving some cash, I decided to skip professional climbing 1 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.
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Build from ashes (= it burned down after I left): Green Climbers’ Home Thakek Watch out for the flies over there. They somehow like ears. Some sort of earplugs or a shirt worn on your head are a good idea when you are securing your climbing partner with both hands on the rope. ↩
Finished a comic containing anecdotes from a train, bus, and bicycle ride from Asia to Germany. Unfortunately, it only contains 1 1/2 months instead of 12. www.vinksthings.com @pinkboris