cliff jumping | Lost Bearings

Friends and Waterfalls

It’s been a busy two weeks with friends coming and going. We have not really had many visitors previously and this past month over a short period of time, Victor (our spanish friend from Ko Tao) came through, my sister spent two and a half weeks with us and most recently a good friend from China made contact. Our friend Luke (standing at 6ft 8in, a giant of man) recently surprised us by coming through to our hometown for a visit. We used to work in China together at English First in Jiaxing and haven’t seen each other in nearly a year. A great memory of mine is hiking Huangshan (aka, yellow mountain) with Angela, Gareth (my good friend from South Africa) and Luke. Luke seemed to be the man of reason and without him we might still have been stuck on that dam mountain. The hike was rather intense and bad weather didn’t help the nerves, but we made it to the highest point, without any major incident ( I did however, nearly get blown off the mountain, and I’m lucky to be alive). Maybe thats just me being a softy, I think I might have been crawling at some point, maybe even crying.

four happy faces standing on the top of Huangshan in China

After unexpectedly receiving his email telling us he was traveling Thailand, we were more than happy for him to come through and offered him a bed in our spare room. With Luke only staying for three days, we had more than enough time to show him around our little town and on the top of the list was ‘Namtok Plew’. This would however only happen on his last day, the same day we were saying goodbye to a close friend of ours David (a hip hop artist from California, who taught with Angela at Satree Thung Song, and who was my first friend in Thung Song). He too loved exploring waterfalls, so when we mentioned a last visit to this majestic cascade, he was not going to say no. We didn’t have much time as David was leaving at 7pm and it was already 4pm. With two bikes we raced off into the hills, hoping we would have enough time to bathe in the ‘infinity pool’, experiencing that feeling of complete calm in our lives, and then if time allowed, get the adrenaline pumping with some cliff jumps at level one.