Having Some Seriously Fun Monkey Business, Laos

The whole Gibbon Ecotourism Experience is an interesting project aimed at providing local village people with a means of income in the hopes of creating a sustainable forest region that generates money not by cutting down forests and destroying Gibbon habitat, and it is working very well. It is a beautiful area, the tree we were in was over 600 years old, it would be so sad to see this area destroyed which is why the Gibbon Experience is working hard to make sure that doesn't happen. The 'Experience' has hired over 60 local villagers to patrol almost 20% of the Reserve and to maintain the tree houses, cook food for guests and so on. The money that the guests pay for staying in the reserve pays all the cost of running the business. All the money made is right now put back into the project, which is nice to know. The tree houses themselves have minimal impact on the area, right now there are 5 of them and each is far away from the others (sometimes several valleys separating them) so guests get a real wilderness jungle experience.

Before we began to live out every kids tree-house fantasy we would have to get to our destination first. We were told that the tree-houses were deep inside the 130 000 hectare Bokeo National Reserve and that we may have to hike for up to 10 hours to arrive if we couldn't make it in a 4x4. Fortunately for us we hadn't had much rain in the last few days so things might be alright. Our Toyota Land Cruiser got us to within an hours walk of the first tree house, the drive in was far from ordinary. We drove from Huay Xai for about an hour on perfectly normal roads until we turned off abruptly and started down a steep dirt track that led us straight into a fast flowing river, this was nuts. The snorkel equipped 4x4 beast of a truck now made clear sense to us. We made it across the river with ease and then slid, bounced and climbed our way along 40 minutes of rugged off-road terrain until we arrived at a small idillic village. The village looked as it probably did hundreds of years ago, no signs of modernity, except for us and a bunch of Irish tourists getting out of our dirt eating truck (in case you haven't picked up on it yet, we thought this 4x4 was one seriously cool machine, a tank of a vehicle ready to take on anything, even fully loaded with passengers, luggage and food).

We headed into the woods until we arrived at a wooden shack with a bunch of rock climbing harnesses hanging on a line strung across the porch. These were much like rock climbing harness', but with one key difference; a small double wheeled transport pulley that was clipped to the front of the harness, this little guy was to become the source of some serious fun. We each grabbed a harness and walked a further 5 minutes into the woods, but not before being accosted by a monkey that liked to terrorize Steff by jumping on her head and a small black bear who was obviously comfortable with us around.

We arrived at our first zip line, a long steel cable that would take us straight into Tree House number one. Most of the group would stay there but we stayed at tree house number three with a lovely Irish couple, a further 40 minutes away, involving 3 zip lines and a 20 minute walk. When we finally zipped into our tree house we arrived to find ourselves 45 meters of the ground in a tree house complete with a kitchen (including a stove), bathroom with shower and running water, this was amazing! The tree house was basically open concept (no walls, just wooden railings) allowing for fantastic views over the trees and valley below

We spent the next three days zipping around the forests, covering 15 of the zip lines in all, some over 450 meters long. We also did some hiking through the jungle with the hope of seeing Gibbons, a once thought extinct monkey that makes some of the most incredible sounds we've ever heard. Sadly we did not see the monkeys (or tigers, or elephants, or anymore black bears), but it didn't matter. Living in these tree houses and transporting ourselves the way we did was just so much fun, it is astonishing how many valleys and how much terrain you can cover on these zip lines in no time at all. We were truly kids again.

What a truly fun time we had. Sure there were many leeches and the biggest spiders we've EVER seen, but heck it IS the jungle.

Check out some of the pics and video of us zipping to get a better idea of what it was like.

Video1: Morning Mist

Video2: 400m Zip Line with Justin