| Thailand's Railay Beach |
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Page 1 of 2 For world-class climber and author Sam Lightner Jr., Thailand’s railay beach is the place to live 
My only consolation as I endure 48 straight hours of travel to a spot halfway around the world is the Railay Agreement. I first heard of it years ago when I was crouching in the shade of a limestone cliff on Southern Thailand’s Railay Beach with Sam Lightner Jr., rock climber, writer, adventurer, and philanthropist. In essence, it states that there is nowhere on the planet better than Railay Beach. Period.The agreement grew out of the annual exploratory trips Lightner and a few friends took nearly every fall in the nineties in search of somewhere—anywhere—to rival their adoptive home on Railay. No matter where they ventured, from Palawan in the southern Philippines to Kalymnos in the eastern Grecian isles, no place measured up. “The Railay Agreement,” recalls Lightner, now 40, “was when, after weeks of slogging through jungles and buzzing fruitlessly around on boats, we all agreed, once again, that there was no better place to be than Railay Beach—and that we had to get back there as soon as possible.” Perched at the tip of Thailand’s Phra Nang Peninsula, Railay Beach is actually a pair of gold-sand beaches painted on both sides of an hourglass-shaped isthmus. It can be reached only by sea, as thousand-foot plugs of honey-colored limestone erupt skyward from the beach, severing direct access from the mainland. For the final leg of my trip, I jump into a longtail boat (basically a souped-up double-wide canoe) in the boomtown of Ao Nang. As the boat motors across the open water and around a soaring promontory of rock, Railay’s perfect crescent of sand, palms, and stone jumps up to meet me. I have to admit, the Agreement still holds. 
Midway up the bay is the Railay Beach Club, a community of widely spaced bungalows scattered around a 24-acre swath of coconut palms. This is the place—specifically, an airy, red-tile-roofed three-bedroom wood cabana beneath a swell of stone on one of the Club’s quietest plots of land—that Lightner calls his second home. As the craft eases into shore, I clamber up onto the sand and set off in search of Lightner, my personal tour guide for a few days.The son of Earl Sams Lightner, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker from Corpus Christi, Texas, and grandson of Earl C. Sams, who helped build JCPenney, Lightner spent most of his youth in Jackson, Wyoming, where the family moved when he was eight. He grew up in the horse and ski cultures of mountain society but was drawn to the tight-knit climbing community as he became older. Lightner’s family received an inheritance from Sams, and after leaving college, Lightner made the most of his circumstances, turning his energy to rock climbing, and supplementing his income with his passion for writing. Since then, Lightner has climbed in two dozen countries and published three books, including All Elevations Unknown, a bestselling adventure narrative about the battles for Borneo during World War II. Lightner’s love affair with Railay Beach began—as it has for so many visitors—on a climbing trip with a couple of friends. Though the area is one of the world’s best-known exotic climbing locales today, back in 1989, when Lightner first showed up, the place was the cliché deserted beach, with one notable anomaly: It was festooned with karst towers, the kind climbers dream about. “It’s relatively easy to find areas with good rock but little atmosphere, or crags with a nice setting but bad rock. Railay is one of the few places in the world that has impeccable stone that comes straight out of the water,” says Lightner. “My first time out here, I knew this was it.” Lightner rented a room in a local bungalow and threw himself into developing the area for climbing. As Lightner steers me around to his favorite spots on the peninsula, climbers stop and greet him, asking advice and occasionally uttering a few words of thanks for all the work he’s done here. It occurs to me that Lightner inherited more than just money from his grandfather, who committed half his wealth to charity. Long a benefactor in his own right, Lightner has devoted himself to Railay. Through both the hard manual labor of equipping routes and advocacy for the area on the international climbing stage, he became Thailand climbing’s de facto ambassador and caretaker. |
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