The Gibbon Experience

Hello,

It's been a while since my last post. Lots has happened since my last message. After northern Thailand, we headed over into Laos, to get our dose of adventure for the trip. The source: The Gibbon Experience (http://www.gibbonx.org/)

The general idea: three days/two nights of intense jungle trekking in northern Laos, 5 hours from the nearest glimpse of town or village. To get around, a crazy jeep ride through a mountainous logging path, followed by a solid 5 hours of trekking a day. Then, we zip lined through the jungle canopy. For those of you not familiar with zip-lining, you basically get into a climbing harness, clip a safety carabiner onto the zip line, which consists of a steel cable tied from one tree to another. Then clip on the glider (two rollers secured on to the cable by another carabiner, and a piece of tire acting as the safety brake), drop off your feet, and your body weight does the rest for you! Next thing you know you're soaring over the junlge, at some points 150 plus meters over the jungle!

The longest crossing we did was a 400 meter long line connecting to a small platform built in a tree about 100 meters above ground. Then we changed our safety line to the second line, switched up our glider, and dropped onto the next 380 meter long line, which again took us high above the jungle canopy. We literally flew from one moutain top to another across the valleys! It was incredible. I have some video I'll be sure to share when I get back.

As for sleeping, no tents for us! We slept in jungle tree houses built high above the jungle floor. This was the hardest part for me with my fear of heights. Zip lining is one thing; it's so fast and so beautiful and the adrenaline is pumping as you let yourself drop off the edge of a slope and start zipping. But to sleep over and be confined to a tree house for several hours, at over 100 meters elevation was too much for me at times! Needless to say, no sleep for thos 2 nights for me! And Jennie was too worried about snakes to sleep well, so we were so tired by the time day 3 was done. Oh, and I couldn't use the toilet/shower either. The photos are self-explanatory!

Here are a few pics I hope will give you a small sense of what it was like. Oh, one last thing: there were about 50 spiders the size of my hand on the roof of our first tree house. One was eating a moth the size of a peach. Nice. Add to that the bats, rats, millipedes, jungle noises and total darkness in the tree house, and the faint of heart need not apply for the Gibbon Experience!!!