The small ones are always annoying.

I’m not just talking about insects - small people too. Like kids. And people who are physically smaller than you. Can you imagine what Gulliver must be feeling when those annoying tiny Liliputians are tying him down? I know my tall friend, Toe, thinks I’m frigging annoying too and she attributes that to my size. She thinks short farts like me are loud and makes a lot of noise just make up for our diminutive size. So whenever we play “fake” basketball (meaning without the actual ball), she always puts her hands against my forehead when I try to snatch the imaginary ball from her. Now, that really annoys me. Nonetheless, I like playing fake basketball because it is the only time I get to execute a slam dunk (even though it’s through an imaginary hoop)

I am losing the plot...

Recently, I met someone who even smaller than me….. and ten times more annoying than I am. She was yakking non-stop about the most mundane things – mostly personal information about her that I don’t really care about. She butts into each and every of my conversation with other people, too. For example if I am telling someone a story about climbing, she will cut me off to talk about what a good climber a friend of a friend of a friend of hers is. Zzzz...

Speaking of climbing, as you know, I was climbing in Krabi last week with Toe. As evidenced in the mug shots I posted in the last entry, we were climbing very hard – hahhaha! NOT! But I must say it was a fantastic trip. We were totally in the zone. Within an hour or two after getting off the long tail boat, me and Toe went into island living mode. This means, our minds completely blanked out. We did the same thing everyday -. climb the whole day, ate at the same restaurant (hello yam yam!), ate the same things (hello deep fried red snapper in green curry sauce!), read the same magazines (hello.. hello!) and have a massage by the same Krabi auntie at the same rundown place every evening.



Hello fishy fishy..

Sour mango and sweet warm sticky rice

Ah, the precious moments we had. One of my favourite moments is going back to our hotel after a long hard day of climbing and making the Toe wash all my dirty gears. She does a really good job of it. She scrapes off mud from my climb shoes with her fingers. After she is done cleaning, we will sit on our respective deck chair in the balcony and drink wine and smoke many cigarettes while discussing our life woes for hours. After we are sufficiently drunk, we will swagger over to our massage auntie for some ache relief. It’s a little piece of heaven, I swear.

The view from our deck chairs

And speaking of heaven (or wherever people go to when they die), I think I got a teeny weeny too close to it on the second day of our trip. I was lead climbing up this fantastic 25m crag but when I reached the anchor and clip on my safety sling, it gave way. To cut the long drama short, I fell – and it wasn’t the kind of fall that you know you will be alright since this is the kind where your equipment gave way. I often hear of people saying they have all sorts of epiphany and last thoughts when they thought their end is near. What are Frou’s last thoughts? It was a very unsophisticated, “Alamak. I am not tied in. Bye bye.” And back on the ground, 25m below, my dear friend, Toe, was having more coherent thoughts going through her head. She later told me she was already thinking about how to report my death to The Man and my family and how to get a helicopter to ferry me back to mainland. (She’s sweet like that). In the end, as you guess it, I didn’t die because my belayer broke my fall eventually. The not so good news is, I still have to finish that climb after!

The rest of the trip went well without drama, thank goodness, and the two of us came back to Singapore in one piece, and most importantly, we remain friends. You see, before our trip, the Toe bought a couple of climbing gears for us (we shared the costs) and she ask me whether we should keep the receipt. I said we should in case the trip (this is the first time we are travelling together, just two of us) breaks our friendship and we need the receipt to return everything so that we have a clean break between us.

Well, I’m glad we can throw that receipt away now.



The Frou & Toe's mangled fingers



Harry the Monkey - climbs better than any of us