Previous entry: Overland Through Laos

My friend Dani and I started off in Houayxai, a pretty little Mekong River town in northern Laos where the Gibbon Experience office was located. We got a room at a guesthouse near the office, and checked in with them. It seemed that because we had not confirmed our reservation online, we couldn’t go out in the next day’s expedition. I felt like an idiot – I thought that surely, no one else would know about this gibbon thing, right?

Turned out it was hugely popular and drew people from all over the world. We would have to stick around and wait for a couple days to see if anyone canceled their reservations, or failed to show up. We didn’t mind hanging around this cute town for a little while, anyway. It had Lao and Chinese markets, some ornate Buddhist temples where we posed with young, orange-clad monks, and a cute little tropical bar with pillows on the ground, art on the walls, candles and incense burning, and a potted marijuana plant for decoration.

Lao children playing in the marketplace

Lao monks taking photos with Dani

On our second day there, we got the news that people had failed to show up, leaving open slots on the next day’s expedition. Our party consisted of my friend and me, plus five others of varying ages and nationalities. Early the next morning we got up and were driven about two hours into the mountains. The van stopped at a tiny roadside grocery and we got out, because this was the beginning of our trek. It was rainy season, and the mountain roads weren’t navigable. During the dry season, the van would continue to drive up into the mountains closer to the Gibbon Experience, but in the rainy season we had to walk up.

So walk we did — for six hours, under the beating Southeast Asian sun, up and down wet clay mountain roads, up and down forest footpaths on muddy ledges no wider than two feet, slipping constantly on the red mud. It seemed as though there were never any flat parts to the trek; it was either up or down, usually pretty steep either way. It was exhausting, dirty, and draining. Five hours in, we reached a tiny village — little huts and a small store with a bench out front where we collapsed. We bought water and Cokes, ate, and gathered our strength for the last part of the trek, arguably the hardest. It took a little over an hour, mostly on a very steep and muddy uphill, through the forest. Most of the paths were a series of slippery steps. I thought I could possibly die, right there in the Lao jungle. Staggering up the last flight of mud steps, I could hear the sound of laughter and hollering above me … we were finally at the Gibbon Experience.

We had arrived in a clearing with two large huts. One was an outdoor kitchen; the other was a giant room for sleeping. Between the two structures was a volleyball net and about 20 young Lao men from the village we’d just crossed; barefoot, playing a volleyball-like game, except with a smaller straw ball, and kicking it instead of using their hands. It was kind of like hacky-sack volleyball. It turned out they were our guides, the locals who brought tourists through the jungle, trekking and on zip lines, and who maintained the six tree houses that the Gibbon Experience had built.

Treehouse in the sky, 150m up

One of the guides, named Charlie, distributed climbing harnesses. Attached were a safety rope and a zip line wheel pulley, covered in a strip of car tire. The tire was our brake, Charlie told us. He led us into the woods, up and down another muddy path until we got to the first zip line terminal, a steel cable with one end wrapped high around a tree and the other extending over the treetops and into the distance.

As we’d learned in our safety video back at the office, each zip line is one-way only. When green tape was wrapped around the cable at the terminal, that meant it was an outgoing line and okay to ride. Red tape indicated it was an incoming line and you couldn’t clip on there. One by one we climbed a wooden platform up the tree, clipped our safety rope into the cable … slid our roller onto the steel cable and locked it into place … undid our safety rope and clipped it onto the zip line … and jumped off the platform, whizzing into the void.

A mixture of panic, as I hurtled over a 3-story drop — and exhilaration, as I flew across the line, my wheel buzzing noisily next to my ear — accompanied that ride and every other time I climbed onto a zip line. I couldn’t believe how much fun it was, like flying, and how unbelievable to look down onto tall treetops and out over a sweeping green Lao mountainscape.

That first cable took us to Treehouse 1, a necessary point along the Gibbon Experience’s zip-line network. There was one cable leading into the treehouse, and two leading out in different directions. The treehouse itself was a childhood fantasy come true. It had three levels embedded in the thick fork of a ficus tree, with a kitchen and bathroom, all with running water. The bathroom was the requisite Lao bowl sunk into the floor that … merely opened up into the abyss below, where a compost heap fermented. Our beds were cot mattresses on the ground. A Lao guide zipped in to us with a giant bag on his shoulder, from which he unloaded our dinner in metal camping pots. He distributed rice, veggies and meat and grinned as he clipped onto the outgoing line and zipped off, dangling almost upside-down to wave goodbye to us as he flew away.

That night, as we’d been warned, tree rats chattered and scampered around us; one of them chewed through our canvas bed net and, memorably, ran across my head. We didn’t get much sleep. At dawn I heard a ghostly hooting sound; I thought that must be the biggest owl I’d ever heard. It got closer and closer, until I was convinced he was right above our thatched roof. The next day I learned that was no owl; that was a gibbon, and it would be the closest I would get to a gibbon during my jungle stay.

The next day veered between us using the zip line network — clamping on, zipping, climbing uphill to the next zip line, clamping on, zipping, climbing — until we were exhausted. Breakfast, lunch and dinner came to the tree house via our acrobatic tour guides. We figured they must have the best jobs in the world. We were also visited by forest patrol rangers zipping around the network with AK-47s strapped onto their backs, on the lookout for poachers; and our housekeeper, a young Lao woman who bunched up her native sarong, zipped over, pulled a broom and other housekeeping items from her bag and proceeded to clean our entire treehouse top to bottom before zipping off to the next house.

Originally published 2008 on ExplorerPod.com