Gibbon' it all

I had the strangest feeling the other day; I got in a truck in Laos and realized about 5 minutes into our drive that we were driving on the right-hand side of the road. For the past 4 months, it has always been the left-hand side. It was weird to feel what is normal to me feel wrong.

We were on our way to "The Gibbon Experience," a three day, two night zip-lining and trekking adventure in the middle of the jungle, in the northwest part of Laos. We arrived in Laos late Saturday afternoon after a 6-hour bus ride from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong in Thailand. Then we crossed the Mekong river in a shaky, long-tipped boat to Huay Xai (pronounced "way sigh") in Laos. It is a small transit town for tourists and backpackers, with one main street that has all the guesthouses and restaurants, though not very many locals can speak English.

The next morning, we met in the Gibbon office with ten other people. We split up into two groups of five and seven and piled into trucks. The road was a lot better than I expected. Laos is further behind than most of South East Asia in terms of development, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself on a nicely paved highway for most of the journey.

Our trip came to a stall when our truck had to pull over and fix something with the axel. We sat on the side of the road for close to an hour while our driver worked to fix whatever was wrong. We were at a small store that seemed to be a meeting point for a lot of the Gibbon employees.

Once we were ready to go, we all got back in the truck but didn't make it more than 100 meters when the driver turned back around, we all got out, and he started fixing something again. Another fifteen minutes passed and a new truck arrived to take us the rest of the way.

We finally turned off the highway a little bit later and drove for another 30-45 minutes down a rough, dirt road to a small village where the other group was waiting. I didn't quite understand why they were waiting for us because as soon as we got there, they took off and we had to wait five minutes before heading out.

We heading out on foot towards the mountainous jungle with only a small backpack with our clothes. We stopped after fifteen minutes for lunch then continued on. It was almost straight uphill after that. We climbed and endless amount of makeshift stairs to make our way up to the base camp. I started to feel the burn in my untrained legs very quickly and I was surprised at how hard I found I to breathe. Everyone had passed me at this point and I was slowly making my way up the never ending stairs with just a guide with me. I started to worry how I would handle the rest of the trek if I was having so much trouble already. After several breaks to give my legs a stretch and my lungs a chance to catch up, I made it to the base camp where the others already were.

We were each given a harness for the zip line as it started to rain. The rain didn't matter much because we had all soaked through most of our clothes with our sweat. It helped to cool us off as we still had another 2 hours to go to get to our treehouse.

We reached our first zip line after a ten minute walk. I snapped my safety carabeener onto the cable and climbed onto the main part of the wooden platform. Then I unhooked my zip roller and latched it onto the cable as well. The roller is two metal wheels that slide along the cable and are held together inside a metal casing. There is a piece of a rubber bicycle tire on top to serve as a brake when squeezed against the cable.

I sat down on the edge of the platform and waited for the okay to go from the guide on the other side of the line. After hearing it, I slid off the platform and accelerated along the cable through the trees until they opened up and I was speeding along the line in the middle of the sky. I looked down at my dangling feet and saw the ground very, very far down below. I looked out to the forested mountains in the distance and the huge open area around me. I felt excitement and exhilaration, but also major fear and panic from being so high up. A series of unprintable words ran through my head as I realized what I was doing.

Forty seconds later, I was arriving at the platform at high speed. I hadn't actually tried out my brake yet so I wasn't pressing down on the right part. I zoomed toward the platform and nearly crashed into the tree that the cable was attached to. Thankfully our guide stopped me before I could injure myself.

We carried on through the jungle, going across more zip lines and hiking up more inclines. After climbing the stairs at the beginning of our trek, my legs were shot. It became even harder for me to walk through the trees and up more hills. It was one of those tests that was so physically demanding that all sorts of thoughts and emotions were running through my head. Anger, frustration, sadness, and more were all building up inside me. I started thinking mean thoughts, the kind of thoughts that only come up in times of intense pressure, but that you would never actually say out-loud. There was no way I could stop going and I didn't want to. But I was shocked at how my body was handling the trek, or not handling it rather, and I just wanted to make it to the treehouse.

Finally we did. I was elated to be finished, but nervous about the two more days ahead of us. I pushed it to the back of my mind as we explored our treehouse. It was a circular, open-air treehouse about 50-60 meters off the ground. There was a small staircase leading to a second level that had room for two people to sleep. The main area had room for six more to sleep, and had a kitchen sink and area for a small table and camping chairs. There was a bathroom with a shower-head attached to one of the branches of the tree, a sink, and a squatting toilet. The toilet was often swarmed with wasps as there was a nest nearby, so we had to use the shower-head to spray any buzzing around before going about our business.

We had a cooler full of fruit and other snacks in our treehouse that our guide cut up and put out for us to eat. Other guides zipped in and out of the treehouse bringing dinner and hot water for tea and coffee from the kitchen not too far away. The sun went down around 7 and though we had solar powered lights, we sat in the almost complete darkness with our group watching fireflies and drinking the "whisky" in our cooler. We were with a German couple who seemed to be in their late twenties, and a Dutch girl the same age as Simone and I.

The second day turned out to be much better than the first. We packed up our bags and zipped out of our treehouse and headed out on another two hour trek. This had some hills, but nothing compared to the stairway to heaven (or hell) we had to climb the day before. We hiked and zipped all the way to a waterfall where we stopped to swim and eat lunch. We trekked another 20 minutes or so to our new treehouse for the night. We zipped in under the treehouse and crawled up a few stairs to get inside. This treehouse was smaller, with the bathroom being below the main area, next to platform where we zip in on. It was more set in amongst the trees so it felt lower to the ground. But looking down we figured it was probably a bit higher. It also swayed whenever someone came to or left the treehouse.

It was only 1pm when we got there, but it felt like it should have been much later. A thunderstorm started to roll in around 2 so we couldn't go out and use the zip lines until it passed. We went out again around 3:30-4 after the rain stopped then had dinner. That night passed much like the night before, drinking the so-called whisky from our cooler and hanging out with our group.

The next morning, some of our group went out for a morning zip before coming back to the treehouse for coffee. Then we zipped out of our treehouse and then across the river to hike down to the kitchen for breakfast. It had started to rain before we headed out and it didn't stop throughout our entire trek that day. We trekked for a solid two hours back to the village where the truck would come pick us up. It was a really nice hike, through some cool parts of the jungle. The rain fell constantly, and though we were drenched, it kept us cool. We often stopped to pick off leeches that latched on to our shoes and were trying to crawl up our legs and inside our socks. We had to cross three different shallow rivers, two of which the bamboo bridges were broken. If our shoes weren't drenched already, they were after that. When we reached the third bridge, we didn't even bother using it since it didn't really matter at that point.

Unfortunately, we realized because of the rain, the trucks would not likely be able to make it down the dirt road to pick us up. After sitting around for an hour discussing the possibilities, our group along with the seven people from the other group, and two guides headed out again in wet shoes for the highway. No one really knew how long it would take because the locals were giving us all different answers.

Turns out it was a 4 1/2 hour muddy, mostly uphill hike. Two guys went barefoot and the rest of us walked with our shoes constantly getting clumps of heavy mud and clay. My feet felt like they had extra ten pounds each attached to them. As we worked to get rid of them mud, it would just continue to clump up on the bottom of our shoes. But we just had to keep walking because we had no other option.

The group started to break up as some moved faster than others. I was at the back with the dutch girl from our group and our guide. Simone stayed with us for a while until her impatience with uphills got her motoring to the front of the group. At one point, we were walking next to a man with two small horses and he told me to hold on to one's tail as it pulled most of my weight as I moved my feet along. It was really helpful except for when the horses let one or two rip. I got pulled by the horse for about three hills until the man with the horses stopped to collect some water on the side of the road.

From there, we trudged on the endless road for what I though had been an hour or an hour and a half since we had left. Turns out it had been three. I couldn't believe we had been walking for that long already and the guide said we had another two hours to go. About ten minutes later, I decided I had enough with my shoes. I had planned on ditching then after the trek anyways. So I undid my shoelaces and took off my soaking wet socks and left them on the side of the road. It was either going to be a great idea, or an awful idea.

As soon as they were off, my pace picked up. It was a lot more slippery and I slipped and fell twice, breaking my bamboo walking stick in the process. As we got closer to the end of the road, the mud got harder and there were more rocks. It got harder to walk and my feet got scratched up, but I had no other option since my flipflops weren't going to hack it in these conditions.

An hour and a half after taking off my shoes, and four and a half hours after leaving the village, I saw the last river to cross. I walked through the foot-deep water, cleaning my legs along the way, then finally made it up the last hill to where our very late lunch was waiting. Sigh.