Flight of the Gardiners

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Well we felt like we needed to salvage something of our guided tour experience having kind of crapped the bed on the elephant park decision. So we rolled the dice and decided to go ziplining at the Flight of the Gibbons tour that is advertised every 5' or so around northern Thailand. I notice they're even advertising on this blog. Let me provide them with some additional advertisement.

It was a whole lot of fun.

We were picked up at 615am, brutal after a night of little sleep thanks to being restless and our noisy room but off we went around town to fill up the minivan with other customers. It was an hour drive out into the hills and surprisingly, delightfully, the brown forest turned green the further up the twisting road we went. We were deposited at the small office where we were fitted with our gear and then bussed to the starting point where signs warned us of the dangers of not staying clipped in. Right away the sounds of the forest envelope you and the otherworldly sounds coming out of it allegedly were the gibbons themselves.

The guides we had, Ken and Typhoon were hilarious, a well-oiled machine of comedy and competence. We never had to think about clipping in as these guys took care of everything - definitely safer to take the thinking out of the equation where tourists are involved. The platforms are suspended in huge fig trees high above the forest floor - they clip you in, show you what to do and off you go to the other side. It feels like flying - I could have done it all day. There were also two bridges strung way up there in the trees which are nice because you can pause to appreciate the view a bit longer - for some reason it just didn't even raise the hair on the back of my head to look down 200' from a plank bridge.

After 2km of ziplines, bridges and abseiling we were brought to the base of a nice waterfall to explore. There is a nice hike to the top of it that overlooks the area where the ziplines are strung. They fed us a nice curry lunch and delivered us all too soon back to Chiang Mai. I'll take the little mountain villages with their coffee trees and waterfalls over the city any day.

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Photos

looking dreamy on the sky bridge
don't look down