Climbing the brewery
In Mexico I met a group of guys who called themselves the Rappalleros. That would be the abseilers in English. They were a group of young mexicans who just liked to be active outdoors. Some of them where good climbers, but the majority climbed for less then 2 or 3 months. They were very encouraged and worked hard to get some good climbing-facilities to train on. First they only had a little climbing wall, maybe 5 meters high and 2 meters wide. Soon that became to small for them and so they looked around if they could find a better place. And they found it. An old brewery. 5 stories high, with broken windows, and a ugly concrete wall. The wall was full of wholes since the wall was old and build by mexicans. They fixed some bolts into that wall and used glue (no kiddin') to fix little rocks to use as holds when there was no whole in wall (which we called natural holds then). By the time more holds were added. Most of the new ones were fixed with screws, because the glew wasn't that good. Climbing on them gave me always the feeling of being in some kind
of a dangerous loose alpine-rock-climb. There were a lot of falls because of them, and I never trusted the bolts that much, or better, I was afraid of breaking a piece off that wall by falling into the bolt….
Every Tuesday night we met there, a group of maybe 15 people. Actually most people didn't even climb. Sitting around with a beer, watching others climb was enough sports for most of them. Mexicans are pretty laid-back, Well, I guess nobody expects anything different.
Some of the guys were absolutely into climbing on that wall, and two were actually really good and were doing good progress by training hard. But in fact it still was really relaxing there. From time to time a climb (some of them were pretty hard, and because of the few bolts very scary) then lots of beers and then a final challange. The drive back to my home. After 2 months in Mexico I finally threw all my doubts about drink-and-drive behind me and drove like all the Mexicans as well: like a pissed bat out of hell.
In fact these evenings were always big fun and I met my best friends in Mexico there at that wall.