D’Alroy met Mike at the Red, Dan knew I was headed for Thailand and Mike was bolting routes and running an island in Thailand that no one had heard of. Dan got his email address for me, but I didn’t need it because Mike also knew Chris the Netherlandian from previous SE Asian climbing. Chris knew me from the Boston Rock Gym, and so, in Thailand we had a strange reunion of old friends and new friends after climbing limestone on the beach all day. Mike had bolted a bunch of routes on an island which no one except climbers and rich Thai visited. He invited us to head over. This is why I love climbing.
Ten days later after gorging myself on various ethnic Asian cuisine in Penang and letting my tendons recover from a month of steeply overhanging beach front brilliance, I found myself on a boat to a tiny island in the middle of the Andaman Sea.
Koh Lao Liang is so small that it gets only a passing mention in the Wikipedia. The term ‘barndoor’, specifically referring to hanging from one hand and one foot and peeling off the wall has a bigger write up. It gathers a cool two lines in the Lonely Planet, ‘Mostly Thai, very exclusive’. Clearly the writers of the Lonely Planet and or Wikipedia don’t climb rocks (it’s actually debatable as to whether or not they visit most of the places they write about.. but anyway..) Koh Lao Liang is a single stop on a boat trip between other bigger more popular places that really aren’t all that big or popular on their own right. It’s not very Thai, or very exclusive, or very well known. It’s also not very big. It’s also got fifty awesome routes on hard streaky limestone.
Koh Lao Liang is a score of tents on a half kilometer long beach on an island that’s 90% vertical limestone, and 10% beach. It has one bar hut, one restaurant hut, and one massage hut. Despite being off the grid it manages to provide electricity to the tents 24 hours a day (10-15 more hours than the average Ton Sai beach bungalow.) From my large and basic but comfortable tent I could quite literally throw a rock to the first of the sport routes and spit upon the stalactites that framed the bouldering cave.
So, there I was, stuck on a tropical island in the Andaman with nothing o do but climb rocks, swim, eat, and climb; the horror. Unfortunately for the truly hard core, the rocks face the sun until about noon, fortunately for the lazy (myself included), there’s a slackline and plenty of hammocks to pass the time in until noon. There’s also super clean blue water with soft and hard corals for the occaissional rest day snorkelling trip.
Mike describes the cliffs as ‘having 12 must do routes’, though all the climbs are well bolted with new gear, and none are anywhere near boring. We climbed most everything from 6b to 7b and loved everyone.
As this article is more or less half done and in draft form, I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking until such time as I can drink enough coffee to edit this.
He has 4 bosses, but he doesn’t pay them much attention. Lao Liang is open for the high season which is November to May. After that, the waves and weather get too rough and inconvenient to get to the island. Lao Liang has been open as a resort for 7 years, mostly run by a Bangkok company called X-Site. They organize groups of wealthy Thai to make the trip for some R and R. But that trend has changed in the past year. Bookings of Thai people are down. Last year the resort was 60% Thai and only 40% Westerners while this year less than 20% of the bookings are Thai. Well, until April when it’s the Thai New year and it’s all Thai coming to Lao Liang to celebrate.
