Gibbons and Christmas and the Mekong River!

It's been busy. Real busy. After our "whiz bang" trip to Koh Phagnan for the Full Moon Party, Alex and I had to hustle up through Thailand to make it up to Huay Xai in Laos for the Gibbon Experience.

The Gibbon Experience is an incredible project run in the Bokeo Province of Laos , deep in the jungle. To sum it up.....you spend 3 days in the jungle, sleeping in treehouses 100 feet above the forrest and zipline to get in and out of the treehouses. Yes, ZIP LINE! You strap into a rock climbing harness and clip onto a line that looks as if it will NOT support your weight....and then you jump off the ledge or cliff or whatever and ziiiiiip all the way to the landing. There are various zipline circuits throughout the project, so you could spend an hour or two zipping (as Alex and I did) without doing the same one twice.

So, as for the "getting there" part..... We showed up at the Gibbon Experience office at 8:30AM to hop into a tiny truck with 8 other people. Then we drove for 3 hours, into a small Lao village filled with pigs, naked kids, ugly roosters, the works. We hiked for an hour and a half. Then we reached a spot for lunch and our Lao guides realized that there weren't enough harnesses for our entire group and we all were about to have to walk for another 2-3 hours when Alex, bless his generous sweet heart, volunteered to walk, so that everyone else could zipline the rest of the way.

Now, imagine my frustration. Alex had been looking forward to this trip for months. We had booked it a month in advance. In fact, all he had been talking about was the Gibbon Expereince and how incredible it would be to get the chance to zipline though the jungle. To his credit, he stepped up like it didn't even matter to him, that he didn't care at all. Our group was very cool, though and everyone else started volunteering at once to walk. But Alex held firm and so, we walked with one Lao guide while everyone else ziplined to the treehouse.

Sometimes I do believe in karma. We had parted with the group about 20 minutes previous, and I was spitting mad. I was so angry that Alex's trip of a lifetime was reduced to a walk through the jungle on a clearly untravelled, uphill, unmaintained trail. I was so angry, in fact, that I was mentally writing letters to the managers of the project and cursing whomever had left a harness in the wrong place. I was so angry that I didn't even hear the first gibbon as it was crashing through the trees above our heads.

Our guide was crouching low and I looked down the trail to see Alex crouching as well. "Monkey!" the guide whispered as I tucked down next to both of them. I looked up to see a huge black gibbon, not 20 feet overhead, swinging through the bamboo, followed by a smaller tan monkey. The guide whispered that they were going to pass over our heads, so I stayed put and Alex tried to go around their path to get a picture. (No luck!) They were playing in the bamboo, hopping from tree to tree and making all kinds of noise... barks and howls and trees whacking together.

After just a few moments, the gibbons vanished. They were heading straight for us, and then....nothing. Not a sound to the left or right or back. Nothing. The gibbons arrived like elephants and left like mice. Truly amazing.

I have heard since that most of the people on the Gibbon Experience trip don't even hear gibbons, much less see them as close as we did. No one on our trip saw or heard one, nor did anyone I've talked to since. We were lucky, damned lucky, and I owe it Alex's sweet spirit.

The pictures we'll post tommorow are from both that trip and two day boat trip we took down the Mekong river to Luan Prabang, where we are now. This place is gorgeous!

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