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The Gibbon Experience

I found out about the Gibbon Experience shortly before I left for Laos. The description of the Gibbon Experience – an eco-tourist forest conservation project where visitors live in canopy-level treetop houses and fly above the rainforest on ziplines – was enough to make my friend Dani and I quickly rearrange all our (admittedly shaky) travel plans and veer up to Bokeo Province.

The “veering” wasn’t as easy as all that. Once on an overnight train from Bangkok to Vientiane, we were confident that an overland trip thorough Laos wouldn’t be that bad; in fact, it’d probably be fun. A relatively painless border crossing at the Friendship Bridge and we were in the Lao capital, Vientiane.

We didn’t get to see much of the capital, so I’ll never know if it had any Western-style attributes that many other Southeast Asian cities possess: malls with high-end shops, chain restaurants, Starbucks. What we saw was a sleepy little city, with temples and wats as in Thailand, no buildings taller than three stories and little English spoken. I needed to buy a camera battery recharger, and so we asked where to get one. We were told in the “big mall” – it turned out to be a vast concrete building with a giant marketplace selling cell phones and washing machines alongside souvenirs and clothes. Upstairs was more of a “mall” environment with individual shops, all very local and very Lao. Its food court, thankfully, had pictures of the dishes, so all we had to do was point. Dani had a Lao phrasebook that never seemed to contain any of the things we wanted to ask. We mostly used sign language.

There was no train to Bokeo Province. The bus station housed double-decker buses that looked quite nice on the outside, but was fairly cramped on the inside. Our bus had a toilet, but the bathroom would be filled with luggage the entire trip, so we couldn’t use it. Dani and I were seated in the way back, against the rear of the bus, on chairs that couldn’t recline anyway. The back row had five bucket seats; we saw that four people had crowded into the three seats next to us.

The trip was about 22 hours. Right before we left, the bus driver distributed plastic bags to all the passengers, to the horror of Dani and I, who thought they were expecting everyone on board to throw up. We found later that this was more of a bag for people’s spit, but it didn’t matter: some of the passengers just spat on the floor anyway. The driver stopped every few hours to allow a bathroom break — usually by a few roadside food stalls, so passengers could buy something to eat, but Dani and I had come prepared with snacks. The bathrooms were usually outhouses, with a “Lao-style” toilet bowl sunk into the ground. A couple of times in the night, the bus stopped for extended periods of time and turned off all its electricity, waking us up within moments when the airflow turned off and the oppressive Southeast Asian heat took over. At random intervals during the night, we were awakened by the blare of very loud Lao pop music. None of the other passengers said a word, and as our Lao language book did not contain the sentence “Please stop annoying us with that noise,” we didn’t either.

We rolled past beautiful rolling landscapes, red clay cliffs, increasingly large mountains, lots and lots of huts with satellite dishes outside, and some really nice, French Colonial-looking houses every once in a while. The roads started to get steeper, the mud started to get deeper and the bus really started to shake, bounce, and pitch. A couple of times it got stuck in the mud, or had to stop behind another vehicle who had. When this happened, we all had to file off the bus and wait for the driver, his helper and a bunch of assorted passengers and passers-by as they got the bus through.

We made it to Louang Prabang, ate an incredibly delicious noodle bowl at the bus stop café, and then got in a mini bus for what should have been a 4-hour trip to Louang Namtha. I squeezed into a seat next to another passenger and Dani curled up on the engine cap between the driver and front-seat passenger, who must have been his wife. We made great time, rolling by scenic Lao mountainsides and villages, when the van suddenly came to a halt. All the traffic around us was stopped. There was a large truck in the middle of the road ahead, completely mired in bumper-high mud, blocking traffic in both directions. We had to wait for hours until a crane and a bulldozer had to clear the area and yank out the truck (which promptly became stuck again about a quarter of a mile later).

The crane then plowed into the red clay and rocks of the mountainside, digging up dry rocky dirt to fill up the mud pits and make the road navigable again, at least until the next downpour. Because it was rainy season, this repair job probably lasted about four hours. Late at night we got to Louang Namtha near the Chinese/Burmese borders. We found a guesthouse, showered, and fell into a grateful sleep.

The Gibbon Experience

The morning after our 30-plus-hour bus odyssey through Laos, Dani and I woke up fully restored after a night on a flat mattress. We stopped for a couple of tropical fruit smoothies — one of the great things about Southeast Asia — and some groceries before getting onto another bus that would take us down, this time, to Bokeo Province and the gibbons. Another fantastic noodle bowl later and we got onto a bus heading toward the Thai border. This trip was relatively uneventful, save for the amazing mountain scenery passing by our window. It took us to Houayxai, a pretty little Mekong River town 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 Dani and I 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. On our second day there, we got the good news that people had failed to show up, leaving open slots on the next day’s expedition for us to fill.

Our party consisted of Dani and me, plus five others of varying ages and nationalities. Early the next morning we got up early and were driven about two hours into the mountains. The van suddenly stopped at a tiny roadside grocery stand and we were told to get out, because this was the beginning of our trek. It was the rainy season, and the mountain roads weren’t navigable by any vehicle larger than a motorbike. 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 sun, up and down wet clay mountain roads, up and down forest footpaths on muddy ledges no wider than two feet, slipping 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, this time without satellite dishes, and a tiny store with a bench out front where we collapsed to rest. We gratefully 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. A few of the people in our group had been traveling and jungle trekking for months, and it wasn’t nearly as rough on them as it was on me. 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 hut-like structures. One was an outdoor kitchen where all the Gibbon Experience patrons’ food was cooked on open fire. The other was essentially a giant room for sleeping. It had an outside front porch and a long table. Between the two structures was a volleyball net and about 20 young Lao men, 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. We sat and watched them play for a while. It turned out they were our guides, the local Lao who brought tourists through the jungle, trekking and on zip lines, and who maintained the six tree houses that the Gibbon Experience had built.

One of the guides, named Charlie, distributed climbing harnesses to us all, and we stepped into them and cinched them around our legs and waists. 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 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 look 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 – three levels embedded in the thick fork of a ficus tree, with a kitchen and bathroom, all with running water. The bathroom was the Lao bowl in the ground that … opened up into the void below, where a compost heap fermented. We all chose our beds (cot mattresses on the ground) and took showers. A Lao guide zipped in with a giant bag on his shoulder, from which he unloaded our dinner … meat, rice and vegetables contained in metal camping pots and clamped together. He distributed dinner 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 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.

Go Eileen Go

That night, I wanted to zip again, but nobody else in my group wanted to come. Charlie said he would accompany me – zipping through the forest alone is ill advised – and he and I walked up the muddy jungle paths. He was learning to speak pretty good English. Every time we zipped to another platform, I’d go first and wait for him to follow, and I noticed that both of us had the same huge grins when we landed. It surprised me: any job, no matter how cool, must get kind of routine after a while, right? But he said this was always fun, every day, every time. I believed him. I hated to leave.

Eileen Loh is a freelance writer and World Traveler. You can read more fo her work here