Off the Deep End

About 5 years ago a climbing magazine fell open in front of me. In bold, exciting type the article’s headline read “Deep Water Soloing – Vietnam’s Dangerous New Adventure!” The picture showed a lithe and muscular climber ascending a face of pitted rock overlooking a sparkling and iridescent tropical landscape. Remarkably, the climber was wearing neither harness nor gear – and there was no rope in sight. Being of mild mannered nature and not prone to taking risks I was instantly intrigued.

Soloing, I learnt, refers to the practice of climbing rock faces without the aid of ropes or other protection. Deep Water soloing involves doing so on cliffs that sit over large channels of water deep enough to leap into from great heights. Thus the climber can solo a wall until they fall or decide to jump off. This image stayed with me even as other interests and adventures took place – purposely being so exposed and precariously balanced within nature, driven by the need to challenge and explore your own physical skills and mental resources. Not having much climbing experience at this point, on the surface I was attracted by the pure adrenaline rush of tackling a massive rock wall with nothing but your hands and feet to guide you. However I could tell that there was also something that lay deeper beneath this danger-junky attraction, something magickal which lured me – the idea that with the right skills and right knowledge you can make the imaginary become real. 

Two winters ago my friend Tom and I started making semi-regular trips to the Rock Climbing gym. We’ve been mates since we met at the Degraves St café in Melbourne some 12 years ago. I was the smart arsed kid in the school uniform with the artistic haircut, wagging school, drinking black coffee and hanging out with the older crew who talked about Nick Cave like they knew him personally. Some of them did, in fact – he was Jethro’s dad. The same age as me, but effortlessly cool, Tom was a literal force of nature – like a punk thunder cloud wearing a pork pie hat and a leather jacket. One afternoon Tom, Conor O’Hanlon, Jethro and I climbed a tree in the park and smoked a joint. Before I bailed to make the long train ride home to Upwey, I convinced Tom to let me borrow a CD that he and Jethro were excitedly discussing. He handed it over reluctantly, like he was letting me in on something and not sure if I deserved it. Well stoned and feeling the rumblings of anxious paranoia, I hit play on my discman as the train left Flinders st through the underpass. The opening bars of Rudimentary Peni’s album “Death Church” hit me like a sickening thud. A door opened, made of earth and fire and blood and madness. Anarchist death punk from another dimension – “three quarters of the world are starving!” I dived in to that world head first, and over the years that followed Tom and I became firm friends, sharing houses and music, tattooing each other in basements, getting into fights (mostly with each other), taking drugs and exploring madness and mayhem.

In recent years however, we’ve both started to take the slow slide off the end of our 20s. For a good deal of our friendship, whenever we hung-out one of us would end up bleeding or broken. Breaking into warehouses, falling off fences, getting kicked out of bars, thrown down stairs, jumping through windows, crashing bikes, getting into fights, or even just going mental and breaking things we shouldn’t have. While these are all totally valuable and important ways to occupy one’s time as a young human, super charged on hormones, intoxicants and righteousness – eventually you peak out. There’s only so many times you can go to the same pub, drink the same drinks, have the same dumb conversations and get kicked out for dancing on the bar. I think we were both needed something to get into that didn’t involve partying. But in order to satisfy the need for intensity, it had to involve some level of high exertion and danger. Rock climbing seemed to fill that niche perfectly. It’s social but you don’t have to talk much, which removed the need for alcohol, and it stimulates all those areas of fear/pain/pleasure that we were so used to.

Eventually I raised the idea of a trip to Vietnam with Tom, to pursue this Deep Water Soloing adventure. Not having left the country before, the trip had an extra significance for him – entering the unknown of Asia, which still holds an exotic appeal that it rightfully deserves as a network of countries with such rich and colourful history and culture. It took some time to get the idea off the ground. To get to the climbs we’d need to fly into Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, then travel south another 5 or 6 hours to Cat Ba island, which sits within Ha Long Bay – a incredible network of limestone karsts that have been designated a world heritage area. Earlier this year we decided to go ahead with it and seek out these solo climbs that I’d been dreaming of. We packed our harnesses and shoes, bought some terribly colourful shirts and were away. After an epically long flight into Hanoi via Ho Chi Minh City, we spent a few days there to catch our breath. The Old Quarter of Hanoi is a beautiful slice of modern Asia – incredible sprawling architecture that mixes bamboo with corrugated iron with French balustrades, all rising above tiny streets and alleyways in a race to the sky. Plants explode from cracks in the walls and fight for space alongside the choke of electrical wires that tangle every corner. The streets hum with 125cc scooters that zip past in all possible directions, using their horn to navigate traffic, rather than any clear pattern of road rules. We arrived in the middle of a heatwave and during the day Hanoi was a 35-40 degree oven. The rich scent of frying oil and rubbish and sewerage and cooking smoke and exhaust fumes and the sweat of several thousand people hung thick in the air – almost immediately I found myself with a burning desire to smoke cigarettes, as always tends to happen when I’m in Asia. The air here has such a cultural texture that I need to do my part to contribute. And besides it’s so cheap to buy smokes here that you really can’t afford not to.  

Hanoi's Old Quarter

After a few days of this, we ventured south towards Ha Long Bay, on a typically nightmare-ish bus journey that involved 5 hours of non-stop techno accompanied by Ibiza club videos of gyrating western women. Tom looked on with mild disgust – “Is that really appropriate?” No more appropriate than paying full price for a bus ticket and then being given a tiny plastic stool to sit on in the aisle when the driver oversells the seats. Bastards. I stood instead, and blocked out the music and bus sickness by listening to Rancid. Arriving on Cat Ba we headed straight to the Asia Outdoors office – a tour company run by climbers to facilitate the development of this relatively new sport here in Vietnam. AO was founded only 6 years ago, so most of the climbs and crags here are still being explored. This draws international climbers keen to make first ascents of new routes – where they use traditional gear placed on or into natural rock formations to provide protection as they climb. We met Ross (from the UK) and then Gavi (from the USA) and by the next day were on our way to one of the top climbing spots in Vietnam. 

Approach to Butterfly Valley

Making out way out of Cat Ba town on a hired bike, we zoomed through small villages and radiant forest vistas, crossing unsealed roads with pot holes as deep as the wheels, and dodging tangles of chickens, dogs and children. We had to push the bike, loaded with gear, up one particularly steep hill, and then place our faith in the brakes down the other side. After making a few more unsealed turns off highways and into tiny driveways, we reached Butterfly Valley. This stunning limestone crag rises from the fields around it like an epic monument to geological forces. Approaching it from the farm house, it appears directly in front of you as part of a U-shaped mountain range that cups the area. Dense tropical forest drips off the top, and pools around the bottom, but across its mid section a stark white face of textured rock shines through. After circling the local farm animals and cutting through the jungle at its base, there we were – two friends, 7,626km from home, deep in the Vietnamese jungle with a rope, two harnesses and not enough water. At Butterfly Valley we sport climbed a number of routes. Sport lead climbing is where you carry the rope and your protection up the face with you, clipping the rope at various points into bolts that have been placed into the rock – in this case by the founders of Asia Outdoors. “Roots Reggae” saw us tackle our way through the roots of tree, emerging to a stunning view over the valley. We got ¾ of the way up another climb that we thought was an easier route, only to realise that we had misread the guide sheet and were trying to tackle a grade 28 route, far harder than either of us have managed before! The pinnacle of the day for me was making a 25m ascent through the forest canopy on a climb called “Double Mudslide”. About three bolts up, Tom suddenly yells from below me – “watch out! Hornets!” Right next to my handhold was a nest of huge angry insects that began to emerge and circle. I quickly dropped down a hold, and then traversed away from them, before sneaking above their position via another route. In doing so however I created a bend in the rope that hugely increased the friction that I was climbing against – by the top of the route I was literally forcing my way up each move – not a happy situation when you are 20m high with little more to rely on than your hands and feet. Our day at the Valley ended with Tom trying another route past the Hornet’s nest and being dive bombed by the bastards, who stung him a few times on the head. He fell and I caught him on the rope before lowering him down swearing blue bloody murder. We abandoned the climb and made for home. 

Butterfly Valley

Drinking at the climbing bar later with Ross and Tom I took the chance to expound my theory of why I’m driven to do things that terrify me. It’s to do with a feeling that you have only truly challenged yourself once you wade through the murky and unpleasant bogs of fear to arrive at terrified success. I find it easier than most to push past my reservations about a situation when I know that rationally I have all of the elements under control. My main professional occupation is as an escapologist, and a popular routine is my upside down strait jacket escape, where I hang up to 8m in the air by only my ankles with my hands tied behind my back and no safety line. Each time before that routine I make a conscious effort to subdue my fear by focusing on the rational elements that it plays on. I have checked all the rope and knots in the gear, given clear instructions to the stage hand, warmed up my shoulders in preparation for the escape. And then I have to go out on stage and ask the audience to focus in on just those dangerous elements of the routine that I’ve spent the last hour overcoming. So it’s not fear per se that I am attracted to. Interestingly, since becoming a father 4 years ago I’ve had the opportunity to reflect upon how differently it has made me relate to fear as a function of self-preservation. Prior to the birth of my daughter, I don’t think I had really felt afraid in the same way I do now – as a parent that needs to stay alive for someone else who you love more deeply than yourself. So in the last few years, I have done less things that push me to my limits. But two other moments in which I’ve felt the same rush of exhilaration at overcoming terror to achieve something are racing my TRX 850cc motorcycle against a Ducati Super Sport 1100cc at highly illegal speeds through the forests of Victoria, and walking a 40m Highwire across a river in India with no safety line. Both of these things, like rock climbing, take me to a place of pure focus that is beyond words. Everything except for what you’re doing is blown away by the intensity of the moment in which you exist, and everything afterwards feels like a film in slow motion. It reminds me of the famous quote by Karl Wallenda, one of the 20^th Century’s greatest highwire walkers and daredevils – “Life is on the Wire. Everything else is just waiting”.

A highwire adventure from 2011

At this point Ross offered his own reflection on climbing. 26 years old, an accomplished trad and sport climber and senior staff member at Asia Outdoors, Ross exists deep within the climbing world of grades and reputations, where people try to outdo each other in a competitive environment, naming and developing new routes, comparing themselves and jostling for recognition. “Climbing is for you man, it’s about self development. What you climb, how hard you push, how high you go – it all exists inside your head. If you feel good climbing something easy, do it. If you want to push yourself harder – that’s your choice. But the reward for that should be for your own purposes, not to compare yourself to anything else.”
As self development, I think climbing takes on a spiritual aspect of occult symbolism, such as that found within the sephirot of the Kabbalah. Metaphorically, each handhold you find, each co-ordinated move of legs and hands that you learn how to execute solves a problem that takes you higher. Climbing is the Sephirot of Yasod – the actions that lead us upwards into the Tree of Life, the power of connection between above and below. Pushing past the fear and learning to trust in your own power is a huge magickal lesson. If belief is a tool, then learning to believe in yourself and your abilities unlocks further dimensions of reality than can then be explored. With all this in mind, we sat on the balcony of The Good Bar overlooking the bay and watched in silence as an enormous tropical thunder cloud swallowed the horizon, illuminating the water as it shot blazing strings of lightening from the sky to the earth.

Cat Ba harbour - Not a storm, but beautiful none the less

The next day, fighting off our very unspiritual hangovers, Tom and I boarded a boat with several other climbers and headed out into Ha Long Bay. Populated by thousands of limestone towers that leap from emerald waters, it’s not hard to imagine a red-sailed pirate junk-boat sneaking between it’s islands, or finding a coiled dragon nested atop one of it’s forested peaks.  Ross, Luca and Matty, guides from Asia Outdoors, were kind enough to invite us with them on their day off to adventure around the available walls, where the depth of the tides is appropriate for climbing. We started on the Polish pillar, an enormous spire of rock that erupts from the water, like a rocket hell bent on heaven. Erosion around the base of this narrow column, easily spotted at low tide or on numerous postcards of the famous icon, is set to see the pillar topple over within the next few years. Standing 55m high, at it’s base it is just 2m wide. This makes climbing on the Pillar even more exhilarating! Approaching the Pillar our elderly Vietnamese guide Chu Bien (Uncle Bien) smiled as we began to strip down to shorts and climbing shoes and cover our hands in chalk. “Try not to fall,” Luca explained, “but if you do, make sure you hit the water feet first. Balance with your arms on the way down, but don’t forget to hold them in against your sides before you hit the water or it will hurt. You can hold your nose if you want, but don’t let your head get whipped back by looking down”. 

Polish Pillar

The tire fronted boat bumped gently against the rock as Luca guided me to the first holds and then backed the boat away. Instantly everything was different. No harness to wear, no rope to catch you, no bolts to clip into, and no set route to follow. Just the rock and the ocean. I made it through a tricky traverse section, gripping the rock hard and feeling out every move with a super charged sense of urgency. As I reached an easy vertical crack, I ascended to a natural platform they’d pointed out about 8m above the water. It’s amazing how your sense of scale changes depending on your perspective – surely a truth that can be used in many sociological applications, from dick sizes to acceptable levels of wealth disparity. From the boat the platform looked like an easy jump down into the water. From the platform the air between my feet and the water looked like an enormous space that you could spend an eternity in. Simultaneously calling on and cursing my rational brain’s ability to overcome fear I gave a scream and leapt off.

Deep water soloing in my experience is the rawest form of climbing available. The only resources available to you to propel you upwards or sideways across a problem on the rock are your physical skills and your mental approach, both of which need constant development. Climbing with the more experienced guides gave me a unique perspective on another aspect of what this approach is developed by. Luca, a 27 year old from the German speaking section of North Italy, has been climbing since he was a boy. He learned to trad climb with his uncle in the Alps, and has since made many first ascents of huge and intimidating climbs. With long, skinny limbs and a Mediterranean tan, his climbing style resembled a dragon fly dancing across water, every move a graceful echo of the natural structure that he effortlessly moved across. Much has been written bemoaning humanity’s (or more specifically the patriarchy’s) need to dominate our environment via cutting it down or digging it up, submitting it to our will. Watching Luca climb, and thinking about his stories of tackling huge multi-pitch walls 500m high armed with nothing but traditional gear and a rope, I observed that climbing in its raw state is a organic expression of this impulse for the body to exist within nature, exploring the many and varied ways that we can fit within our landscape while still respecting and admiring it. Later that day and over the rest of our time in Cat Ba we climbed other amazing walls such as Three Brothers, Hawaii 5-0, and Pyramid Cave. Two moments represented the peak of our Deep Water Solo climbing adventure. Both were my last climb for the day, because something in them felt conclusive and significant, like I had found the lesson I was looking for. 

Tom at Pyramid Cave

The first moment was on an medium difficulty diagonal crack leading some 20m up the side of Hawaii 5-0. As I reached the last move, I came to the point where Luca had previously set out left into a more difficult traverse. From the boat below he called out in his sharply accented English “Go fir eet Meeitch! Fight!” 
It was a fucking long way down to the water, I knew that much. I reached out with every inch of my arm and found the next hold, but couldn’t get my weight into it. I shifted my feet, adjusted my weight and reached again, this time firmly taking it and moving across the wall. Another series of huge moves presented themselves, each more tricky than the last. Suddenly I felt this sartori rush through me. “It’s just me up here – and I want this more than I don’t want to fall.” I pushed myself through two more moves, and then as I reached out a third time, something gave way in my position and I was hurtling straight down the cliff to land feet first and completely alive in the water. The second conclusive climb was a few days later on the Three Brothers Wall. As Tom was stepping out of the boat onto a tricky underhang to the right, I saw a hold, chalked my hands and leapt on, with no guidance as to route or holds. As the other crew watched Tom execute the technicality of the overhang, I traversed away from the boat towards a stark and open ocean horizon. I ascended through a difficult crack and found a moment to rest, then climbed higher still, before traversing once more some 20m above the sea. The wall felt like it had opened up to me – I saw multiple paths leading in every possible direction. My hands felt strong as they gripped the rock, and every part of me was moving in pure focus with my objectives. I rested again and then continued, eventually climbing down to a few meters off the ocean before diving in. “Where did you go?” asked Ross, “it’s been like 20 minutes!” It could have been hours or seconds, but in those crucial moments on the wall, I recognised something that I have been seeking all my life. A focus and power to make ideas become reality.

Mitch on Three Brothers

As our tiny boat slowly chugged back into the harbour like a smokers cough, I looked at Chu Bien’s face calmly studying the great expanse of Ha Long Bay, it’s waters both rollercoaster rough and mirror-smooth, it’s cliffs and towers like play-things tossed aside by Giants. “It must be strange for him to see these westerners coming out here to climb” I said to Ross.
“Totally. And remember - anyone his age lived through the American War, being bombed and invaded. And now 40 years later, a bunch of white guys sitting in a boat paying him to watch us hurt ourselves. He can’t even swim! He must think we’re mad” he replied. Later that night as Tom and I were sitting at the Commons Café, the owner Tuin came past and introduced himself as many do, by commenting on our tattoos. He had three of his own, marking lessons from his time in prison when as a young man he and a gang tried to cut out an ATM cash box with a blow torch. We shared many stories that night about prison, and love, and how to surgically enhance your penis prison-style (by placing glass beads inside the foreskin using a knife made from the metallic cover of a battery).
But as he was talking about Vietnamese culture he related to us that “we spent 1000 years fighting off the Chinese, 100 years fighting off the French and then 40 years fighting a civil war and the Americans. And we are still here.”
In the Ho Chi Minh museum in Hanoi, documents show that Ho Chi Minh urged the Vietnamese to make peace with their former oppressors and work towards a better future. “Do the Vietnamese hold any grudges” I asked? 

“No,” he replied, “it’s like the fishermen say – I can walk around the world in a day, because my country is my boat. I have the sky above me and the sea below me, and that is all I need.”

Leaving Cat Ba Island for Hanoi, where Tom and I part directions and I head on to further adventures in Europe, I feel like I have gained something intangible from coming here, like walking a path that unexpectedly takes you in a circle and shows you the same terrain with new eyes.