We started off relatively early this morning with a great French toast and mushroom breakfast that Ian produced from seemingly thin air.
We devoured our brekkie as Ian was taking us rock climbing at 1 Utama’s Camp 5 this morning, so we had to stock-up on energy as it’s a climb-as-long-as-you-like deal, and Ian likes to climb very long.
Camp 5 in 1 Utama – Where the mountain come to Mohamed
Camp 5 is located at 1 Utama, a huge shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur. It’s a climbing gym; a place where you go to climb on stuff. Walls, boulders, shapes, the roof, you name it. It tones, shapes and makes you strong for one day when, like in the opening sequence of Mission: Impossible 2, you’re stuck on a sheer rock face and have to hoist yourself from a thin ledge using only your fingers.
It’s quite a large area made up of walls of pre-fab slabs of rough-textured squares, into which hand and footholds have been bolted. These holds are multi-coloured, each colour representing a route that you can take from the floor to the top, graded in difficulty. Ian spends a lot of time here, because when he’s in Scotland he spends a lot of time against real life mountains.
The 4 of were was keen to play, but Julia’s red toes, acquired from the frisbee the day before, had turned nearly black, so she was in no shape to climb. Ian showed her how to belay using me as the guinea pig. It all went well, but at one point both of them were focused on Julia’s technique, I got pinned to the wall and I got myself a nasty little rope burn across the love-handle to show for it.
After that Ian, myself and Eve took turns to climb and after my first climb, which was very exhilarating, Ian showed me the ropes (chuckle) and taught me how to belay a climber, which I then did on his subsequent climb and for Eve later on. Ian continued some teaching with Julia, who then went on to gain her second injury on this Tour D’ Tom Yum when she belayed at 15kg sand bag and pulled a muscle or something.
We were at Camp 5 for a good 4 hours and when on my 4th climb I was unable to got further than 2m off the ground, I suddenly realised how long we had been at it. My arms and legs refused to co-operate in sending me scurrying up the walls any longer, so after the other two finished their last climbs, we packed it up and headed for a very late lunch.
The rest of the day was spent sleeping – partly because of our early start, but mostly because of our arduous day spent against the treacherous cliffs of the Camp 5 climbing walls.