Our Weekend at Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventure

We started our weekend early Saturday morning, taking 'songthaews' from our guesthouse in Chiang Mai to meet everyone from CMRCA (Chiang Mai Rock Climbing Adventures). We met our wonderful Thai guides, G, Add, Bo, and Ooan and played some fun team building games. We then learned the ropes to rappelling and rock climbing -practicing inside Anxiety State Crisis Cave (not the most reassuring name…). Many people in the group tried tackling the more difficult climbs and everyone successfully rappelled down 130 ft into the bottom of the cave. Several people in the group were afraid of heights but managed to conquer their fears and came out of the experience feeling accomplished. After a long day, we went back and set up tents and ate dinner at the CMRCA camp site. For the first time on this trip our group had the wonderful challenge of bucket showers; we eachhad a large bucket of cold water that we would scoop up and dump on our heads. Everyone was so dirty that the bucket showers were a nice solution. That night we roasted Thai s’mores around a bonfire - made with sticky rice, coconut milk, butter and sugar. After, we set off paper lanterns and watched as they disappeared in the night sky. We awoke the next morning refreshed and ready to take on new adventures and exercise our skills from the previous day. We spent the morning walking up 1,000 stairs to an ancient temple located inside a cave, and later climbed and rappelled into Crazy Horse Cave and explored the bat and insect filled darkness by headlamp. After struggling through the mud and examining sparkling stalagmites and stalactites, our guide urged us to turn our headlamps off and silently enjoy the darkness. I definitely felt a little scared hearing the sounds of bats chirping and water dripping onto the cave floor without being able to see even my hand in front of my face. As we waited to climb back out of the cave, one of the group mates, Hayley, played some old movie music and we all sang along. Our weekend ended with a zip line across the cave to a 120 ft free-fall rappel to the base. Overall, our weekend at CMRCA was a humbling, challenging and extremely rewarding experience. Everyone felt that they had gone beyond their comfort zones and discovered a newfound love for adventuring.

Anna Bloom
SEA Fall '14