Outdoor Rock Climbing

I've never been outdoor rock climbing, I used to go semi regularly indoor rock climbing while I was living in London but I have always thought outdoor rock climbing seemed really exciting and I finally got the opportunity to give it a try today.

As I previously showed Vang Vieng is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which look amazing to climb on. I signed up for a half day course and went to the climbing place in town at 9:30am. I was fitted with climbing shoes and a harness as I didn't bring mine with me. I then hopped on the back of my climbing guides motorbike and he took me out of town down the same roads I had driven on to get to The Blue Lagoon. About half way to The Blue Lagoon we pulled over at an orchard filled with lime and papaya trees.

We dismounted from the bike and walked through the orchard to a gate at the back. We went through the gate to a dry riverbed and walked along the riverbed through the jungle to the base of the limestone cliffs.

We then had to climb up a bunch of sharp rocks and muddy slopes to get to the place where I would be climbing today.

The reason the company uses this place to climb is that there is an overhang at the top which means that it stays dry even in the rainy season. There were about 30 different routes all over the walls in varying degrees of difficulty.

For simplicity sake I will say there are two different types of climbing, top rope climbing and lead climbing. Top rope climbing is when the rope is already in place at the top so that if the climber falls, they can quickly be caught and not fall very far. Lead climbing is more advanced and gets the climber to attach their rope to the wall as they climb to try and minimize their fall. I haven't ever done lead climbing before so I had my guide do every route before me and attach the rope so that I wouldn't have to worry about attaching the rope to the wall as I climbed.

I started on a couple of easier routes, that were pretty hard for me as I haven't climbed in a while and I haven't been working out at all while I've been travelling. Climbing outside is really different from climbing indoors. Climbing inside there are only certain things you can grab onto and everything else is a flat wall. Whereas climbing outside everything is fair game to use to climb on. Just becasue something looks helpful doesn't mean that it is, so you have to feel everything out which means that it takes longer to climb.

I managed to climb a 6A wall, which is about medium and I was absolutely exhausted. The guide then climbed a 6A+ route, which is harder, and then told me to climb it. I was doing surprisingly well until the last 3 meters and then I got stuck. The guide had me climbing up and unclipping his top rope clips as I went along, which meant when I unclipped them all, I could rappel down and we could simply pull the rope out of the top piece and move on to another wall. On the 6A+ I just couldn't do it, I sat there for about 20 minutes trying to get the last three clips out but I didn't have any strength left at all. I finally had to come down and let the guide go back up to unclip the top rope clips.

The guide stopped where I was stuck, looked down at me and smiled and then easily climbed the rest of the way and unclipped the last three, that I couldn't get to. What a punk!

Overall it was a really fun day, with great views and a nice way to try something new. I'm looking forward to doing some more outdoor rock climbing further along on my Southeast Asia trip.

Tomorrow we head for Vientenne

Check out the rest of today's pictures in the slideshow below: