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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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There Can't Be a Word for This (cont.)

EARLY ON THE MORNING OF THE 26TH, I was awakened at my parents' house in Jackson, Wyoming, with news of the disaster. Koh Phi Phi is only 18 miles south of Thailand's Phra Nang peninsula, where a dozen years ago I bought half an acre of land on Railae Beach and built an open-air wooden house near the cliffs on the beach's northern end. I've spent much of my adult life there, working as a writer and climbing the walls of southern Thailand, and now, seeing the first snippets of video from Koh Phi Phi, I realized that both my home and many of my friends could be gone.

I'd first visited Thailand in late 1989, with my childhood friend Mark Newcomb, now a co-owner of Jackson's Exum Mountain Guides. We'd heard reports of a small selection of excellent climbs on Koh Phi Phi, but as we waited for a ferry to take us there, the young Thai boatmen told us of another, possibly even better, climbing area: Phra Nang. They wove unbelievable tales of towering cliffs rising from pearl-colored sand liberally decorated with scantily clad European beauties.

Soon we were in a place fiction could not improve upon. The Phra Nang peninsula pokes south out of Thailand's Krabi Province into the Andaman Sea; it's largely cut off from the mainland by 600-foot walls of orange, gray, and white limestone. A vibrant reef, up to 900 feet wide, protects the beaches. The nightlife was subdued, owing to the limited power produced by small generators, but the lack of music also meant candlelit dinners.

The sheer beauty of the coast and the incredible, steep character of the rock would, in themselves, make a storied climbing destination. But throw in a cool dry season coinciding with the European winter, the fact that Thailand is a common stopover for mountaineers returning from Nepal and Pakistan, and the Thais' well-earned reputation as gracious and caring hosts and you can see why Phra Nang draws more serious climbers than almost any place on earth. At any given time, everyone from Canadian ice specialists to French bolt clippers can be found dangling over the sea on roughly 350 climbs ranging from 5.8 to 5.14.

As I watched CNN in Wyoming, all I could think of was the fates of my friends, both Thais and Westerners. So on December 28, in the thick of a blizzard, I boarded a plane and headed for the horrors of Southeast Asia.

I didn't have to make it to Railae Beach to get a taste of what I was in for. Boarding Thai Airways Flight 249 from Bangkok to Krabi, the province's main city, I smelled a slight, nauseating sweetness in the air. The flight attendant confirmed my suspicions: The plane's hold had been used to ferry out the identified bodies of victims. "We are picking up 40 more," she said quietly, "on our return."

There were only a few of us on board, and I found myself explaining to the well-dressed Thai man across the aisle that I'd been surfing in Bali just after the Al Qaeda nightclub bombing in 2002. There, I saw that when people could not put their hands on the body of a loved one, they often needed to go to the place where that person had lost his or her life. I'd met dozens of parents on Bali's Kuta Beach, Europeans and Americans who had come to see the clear waters that had attracted their children—and the bombed-out buildings where they'd died. Now here I was again, heading to the site of another catastrophe. This time, besides looking for my own friends, I wanted to open my home to the families of any missing climbers to give them a starting point in Thailand.

As we gathered our bags, my Thai friend introduced himself as Senator Pridi Hiranpruek, a member of the Thai Senate Committee on Tourism. Tourism is an $8 billion industry here—ten million tourists visited Thailand in 2003, a number that, before the tsunami, was projected to rise to 13 million in 2005—and it's also the mainstay of the country's long southern peninsula, where resorts line both the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. The Andaman side had been hit hard, and the senator was surveying the damage to coordinate relief efforts. He offered me a ride to Nang Bay, where travelers must give up cars for boats to reach Phra Nang and Koh Phi Phi.

Hiranpruek has a master's in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, and he speaks English better than I do. "Sam, you don't know how much it pains us to see this happen here," he said as we neared the coast. We could see rescue helicopters cruising the bay; I'd heard there were nearly 2,000 missing in Krabi Province, plus 500 dead, but no one really knew. "It is a huge tragedy for Thailand," the senator continued sadly, "but we are so upset that it happened to the tourists. Thailand is supposed to be a safe place."

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