I gave up my accountant's job in Cardiff to go climbing in Krabi for two weeks. Five years later I'm still here, living with the woman who taught me to belay my first route.

I was an accountant in Cardiff, 34 years old, and one day I realised I'd been doing the same job for eleven years without being able to clearly remember a single specific day out of those eleven years. They'd all melted into one.

I took three months' unpaid leave, something my company never looked kindly on but couldn't contractually stop, and went climbing. I'd started climbing at a Cardiff bouldering gym two years earlier, more out of boredom than any real calling, and at some point I read that Railay, in Krabi, was one of the best limestone sea-cliff climbing spots in the world. I bought the ticket that same night.

I spent the first two weeks at a cheap bungalow camp in Tonsai, the beach next to Railay you can only reach by boat because the jungle and cliffs cut off any road. I climbed from dawn to dusk, ate at the same food stalls every night, and for the first time in years slept like my body actually needed it, not like an obligation wedged between two office days.

The climbing school where I signed up for a belaying course was run by a Thai woman named Fon, thirty years old, with more routes climbed on that limestone wall than any foreigner I'd ever met, including ones who'd been coming every season for a decade.

That, honestly, wasn't what I expected. I'd seen Thai women working in nearly every business in the area — restaurants, dive shops, kayak rental — but never as a climbing instructor, let alone running the school.

She corrected my belay technique on day one with no particular patience for me being new, holding me to the same standard as everyone else. I liked that. I'd spent months sick of people at the office treating me carefully just because I sat one rung above them on the org chart.

I extended the leave twice. By the second time I already knew I wasn't going back to that job in Cardiff, though I hadn't told anyone yet, not even fully myself.

Six months after we met, I took a fall on a route I'd been trying to finish for weeks, a hold that crumbled at a point where the last piece of protection was further away than it should have been. It wasn't serious — a bad ankle sprain and a real scare — but I remember with total clarity Fon's face as she rappelled down toward me, no visible panic, giving instructions to the rest of the group in Thai and English at the same time while she stabilised my leg. I spent a week unable to climb, limping between the bungalow and the food stalls, and she came by every night after closing the school to check on me, even though we'd known each other barely six months and had never once talked about what we actually were to each other. That week, with no formal conversation involved, was when I understood we already were something, long before either of us said it out loud.

We started climbing together outside of lessons, first in a group with other instructors, then just the two of us. She climbed routes that scared me just looking up at them from the ground, and I learned more watching her work through a hard move than in any course I'd ever paid for.

There was no clear moment when it turned into something else. It was more that one day I noticed I'd spent weeks organising my whole day around whether she was working or not, and that I'd stopped checking flights back to Wales without even noticing when I'd stopped.

I told her, clumsily, sitting on the sand in Tonsai one night after the school closed. She laughed, not unkindly, and said she'd worked it out before I had, she just hadn't planned on saying it first.

Her family is from a village near Krabi Town, not Tonsai — nobody's really from Tonsai, it's a place made of people who arrived from somewhere else and stayed, foreigners and Thais alike. I went to meet them one weekend, nervous in a way I'd never been presenting quarterly results to the board.

Her father asked, through her translating, whether I planned to stay in Thailand or whether this was a phase. I told him the truth: that I had no idea how long I'd stay, but that I hadn't been back to Wales in three years and was in no hurry to.

It wasn't an answer he especially loved, but he didn't reject it either. I think he appreciated that I wasn't selling him a life plan I didn't have.

I formally quit the Cardiff job in year four, over a video call, with a calm that surprised even me. Now I teach at the same school, belay beginners who arrive just as lost as I did, and on our days off we still climb together, though she still climbs things that scare me to look at from the ground.

We live in a small bungalow fifteen minutes' walk from the school, without air conditioning half the year because it breaks and there's never any rush to fix it. I earn a fraction of what I made in Cardiff. I haven't been this happy in my adult life, and I don't have any dramatic story to tell about how it happened: I just came to climb for two weeks and never found a good reason to leave.