Zorbing on the cheap

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We spent the morning trying to identify a hostel in Bangkok and arrange a trip to a nearby adventure park. The latter proved easier than the former and we found we had quite a bit of time to kill as we were not due to be picked up until noon.

At the assigned time we waited at the assigned place for a minibus. Instead an Irish bloke turned up, said something about there possibly being people there already and fetched a tuk-tuk for us. This turned out to be the slowest tuk-tuk ever, the driver even going so far as to turn the engine off going downhill in order to save fuel. However, we got there in the end and found we were the only visitors to the site that day.

We tried out the aqua zorb first, having not done this in New Zealand seven years previously. It turned out to be a lot more fun than the harness version we had tried in mid-winter when we had last tried zorbing. Basically there were two plastic spheres, a smaller one suspended inside a larger one with a narrow tunnel linking the interior of the inner sphere to the outside. The Cambodians flung some buckets of water through this tunnel, we jumped inside and then they plugged the hole with a space hopper (!). They then manoeuvred the zorb to the edge of a channel running down the hill and pushed us down. Obviously we got flung all over the place and very wet until it rolled to a stop at the bottom and the crew pulled the space hopper out so we could run up the hill and do it all over again.

We gave it a few goes, Sammy opting to go down on her own prompted me to record a movie, but when I went up for a go (so Sammy could record me going down) the tuk tuk driver and another random Cambodian bloke decided they wanted to come too! So, me, my camera and my new friends rolled down the hill and got thoroughly wet.

Sammy and I also tried the harness version - similar design except one person is strapped in upside down and opposite the other. This was quite uncomfortable and the zorb was noticeably deflating as it bounced down the hill so we didn’t do that again.

The park also had a small pond and a zip line to jump in and get wet all over again. We tried that a few times and floated around in the pond on tubes, with the locals trying a variety of tricks to jump into tubes from the bank.

The cost of the ticket also included a snack and gave us an opportunity to talk to one of the western operators of the park, an Australian who told us the first hostel we had stayed at in Sihanoukville was renowned for being rather poor.

Around five we decided it was time to go and our tuk-tuk driver took us back to our hostel. Once we’d returned we bought some bus tickets for the journey to Bangkok, booked a hostel and then had dinner at our favourite restaurant. We spotted a Scrabble board afterward and wasted away a few hours playing word games.

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Photos

Zorb run
The zorbing starts at the top near the shack and runs down the channel and across the small pond.

Tube tricks
Sammy was content to float while the locals tried doing backflips into the rubber tubes.