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Published: August 9th 2007
Monastery above Huay Xai
Far and away the most impressive building in townThe town you come to when you enter Laos from Chiang Kong, Thailand is Huay Xai. Huay Xai is nothing more than a half mile of crude wood and concrete buildings slouched on the east shore of the Mekong river at the bottom of a hill. Most of these buildings are budget hotels or general stores selling shampoo, potato chips and cola, with two or three tourist shops sprinkled around at the center. It might seem a poor introduction to Laos, as the cities that followed were almost all more charming than this one; however, this is exactly the reason that Laos proved to be such an amiable place - it possesses the unique quality of being utterly devoid of pretense. I would say that over 30,000 travelers enter Laos through here, yet there is scarcely a "Welcome to Laos" sign next the the picnic table on the river bank, where the immigration officer checks your visa. No fancy gilded archway or thirty foot high demon statues such as those in tourist centers in Thailand. Just a basic, somewhat dumpy place where people come to get a boat to the first real destination town in Laos, Luang Prabang.
Mind you,
Monastery Roof Detail
I can't get enough of those finials I didn't achieve this romantic view of this place until after I left Huay Xai, which, as I shall relate, took a few days. But, for that, I must inject a little history.
Laos used to be called "Lan Xang", which translates to "The Land of One Million Elephants" a sad reminder of the drastically reduced state of the wild Elephants in the world. Although there are some left in Laos, and though elephants are not known for their subtlety, people who catch a glimpse of any such creatures consider themselves extremely lucky.
The first hint of what I was going to do in Laos was presaged at the beginning of my trip, in southern Thailand. I met an English girl who had come south from Laos who told me about an activity in Laos called "The Gibbon Experience" which isn't published in any guide book (they prefer to get publicity by word of mouth) and which she deeply regretted missing. It wasn't until a second and third traveler I met going in the opposite direction asked me "have you heard of The Gibbon Experience" that it stuck in my head.
Over the course of this trip,
Thatched Hut in a Field
This is what I expected to see in Indochina I have generally restricted my planning time horizon to 36 hours or less into the future, with only rare exceptions reaching to two days hence or more. Accordingly, I first looked up the web site for The Gibbon Experience when I was in Tha Ton, about 40 hours before I reached Laos. It was only at this time that I discovered, to my surprise, that the booking office for this place was in Huay Xai, of all places, and the site where the gibbon experiencing takes place is about four hours northeast of Huay Xai. I had expected it to be deeper into Laos. I sent them an email asking them to save me a spot. I hadn't gotten a reply from them by the time I got to Huay Xai, so I strolled down the one street in town to their booking office, the door of which was surmounted by a hand-painted sign whose penmanship could only be justly described as scrawl.
The English volunteer in the office explained the details of the activity, which was still not clear beyond the generalized enthusiasm that others had communicated to me about it. The activity lasts three days
Bokeo Village
This is the end of the road and two nights. After a four to five hour ride, I and five other people would hike for one to three hours to a treehouse built high up in a tree in the jungle. Once there, we would do a few hikes through the jungle in the morning and afternoon of the next two days. The "special sauce" that distinguishes this from other resorts in the woods, is the ziplines.
For those who aren't familiar, a zipline is a steel cable strung between two sturdy objects, usually trees, one end attached a bit higher than the other. Pull on a climbing harness that goes around your waist and legs, clip yourself to a wheeled metal shuttle that rolls along the cable so that you hang below it, hold your breath, and jump into thin air. With a pinch of luck, the harness and cable will hold, and you will begin zipping down the cable from the higher end to the lower end.
The Gibbon Experience people have put up dozens of steel cable zip lines to navigate about the jungle, and it is this activity that is supposed to mimic the experience of being a gibbon. [a href="
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbon"]Gibbons, you see, are fairly rare in this area, so, in order to manage expectations, they explain that you shouldn't expect to see gibbons while you are out in the jungle.
The stated purpose of the project is to offer the villagers living in the jungle a way to earn a living without damaging the forest. The goal of the project, as they explained it, is to hand it fully over to the villagers in a few years, so that they are no longer reliant on volunteers to run the office or manage logistics.
All of this sounded good to me, enough so that I was even willing to accept the very westernized price: 5000 baht, about $140, for less than three days. But there was another price - my unwillingness to phone them (international call!) two days earlier meant that I would have to wait three days for the first spot. I couldn't imagine spending three days in Huay Xai, but I had been invited into an exclusive club! Membership by word of mouth invite only! Swallowing hard, I decided that it would be worth it. Plus, a few days of living cheaply in Huay Xai (my
Wow
That's the view from the tree house hotel cost 100 baht, $2.85 a night) would help to average down the $47 a day cost of this extravagant eco-tourism activity (a specious economic argument, I am aware, but it was the best I could come up with).
The next two and a half days were pretty dull. I made lots of progress on the book that I was reading,
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, rented a bike which looked like a good mountain bike, but turned out to be a crappy, too-small Chinese facsimile of a good mountain bike, and rode around to some of the nearby villages, and slept late. It was here that I saw my first example of UXO architecture. UXO, or unexploded ordnance, are bombs that were dropped on an innocent Laos by the United States and Vietnamese as the Vietnam war overflowed to the west, but which failed to detonate. Such ghosts of Laos' past haunt the countryside, causing fear not unlike that of the millions of land mines that lurk beneath the soil in Cambodia, as they can also explode unpredictably when walked or driven upon. However, with the pragmatism that accompanies poverty, locals have found that if
the shell casings can be divested of their payload, they make great stilts for the raised huts that most Laotians live in. A bit shocking at first, but so incongruous that it is easy to overlook completely (your brain just assumes they are logs) if you aren't expecting them. I've also seen shell casings split lengthwise and used as decorative planters! I'd love to know if the owners were trying to say something with that...
I had a scare the day before I was supposed to head to the jungle - the park rangers had closed a part of the forest where about half of the treehouses are located due to the presence of poachers. Life in the developing world. Fortunately, they were able to find space for about half of the people who had signed up, and I was lucky to be one of them.
When the day arrived, December 31, New Year's Eve, I strolled up to the Gibbon office and met the five other people designated to experience Gibbondom with me - an all North American crew: three Americans and two Canadians. A bone rattling four hour bus ride later, we exited at a rural
Jungle Vine
Prolly a foot in diameter village consisting of about 20 bamboo and thatch huts on stilts. This was as far as the road penetrated into the Bokeo Nature Reserve. There rest of the way would have to be covered on foot.
A two hour hike through hilly jungle past fifty foot trees and riotous bamboo plants with hundreds of stalks emerging in a javelin-like fusillade from the ground, and we reached the first hut, affectionately referred to as "treehouse one". Here, we stopped for lunch, during which several adorable monkeys (not a Gibbon) climbed all over us and did his best to take all of our stuff out of our hands. After lunch was liftoff time - our first zipline. I can try to describe the experience, but if you've got the bandwidth, take a look at these dramatically-titled videos that I took, at great risk to my own welfare, as they do a better job describing it than I can possibly hope to do:
(If it asks, you can open them with Windows Media Player. Mac users, I wish I could help.)
The Treehouse Looms
and
What it's like to be superman.
It's an unforgettable experience. The
Asian Black Bear
He was incredibly cute. And strong. An abandoned pet, they were trying to teach him to live in the wild again. wind whips past your face as the scream of the shuttle's wheels fills your ears. Tree branches zoom mere feet from your head, bamboo stalks tickle your toes, and the tree ahead to which the cable is anchored to can approach at a truly alarming rate. The word exhilarating does not do it justice.
The tree house we stayed in would more aptly termed a tree villa. It was large structure, probably 25 feet in diameter, with two floors, built around a huge tree, 60 or 70 feet tall, perched on a steep hill. The view over the canopy of the hilly jungle of northern Laos was magnificent, one of nature's great masterpieces. The tree would sway, just at the edge of perception, whenever somebody got on one of the ziplines anchored to it. The food the guides brought to us via zip lines from a kitchen on the ground about 1200 feet away, was phenomenal, consisting of delicious varied curries and mountains of sticky rice, a specialty of laos. There was no electricity, but they did have (exquisitely cold) running water, piped from a stream above. The shower forced the guests to weigh the import of hygiene against
Thirsty Monkey
Drinking from a Camelback water bottle. They are so much like mischievous little kids, it's a little disturbing. an early demise: it was a cutout in the floor platform, a wood lattice "drain" the only thing preventing you from following the water as it plummeted 60 feet down to the ground below. The bath room had a view that obviated the desire for bathroom reading, which was fortunate, as it was advisable to hold on to the limb that pierces the bathroom area to retain one's balance on the precarious squat toilet.
We celebrated New Years Eve 2007 at the top of the tree in a jungle, with a bottle of cheap champagne that one of the Canadians brought, plus a bottle of ginger flavored laos laos, a local moonshine that we struggled to get down. It was unquestionably the most exotic venue that I've ever celebrated the coming of the New Year.
After two nights and several hikes through the remarkably unspoiled jungle, it was time to go back to the ground. In an episode that I don't really need to talk about, I managed to separate myself from the entire group walking back and found myself stranded, as the path had too many forks for me to hope to guess which route the group
had taken. As I rehearsed the sign language I would employ to ask the farmers I had seen living along the trail for a place to sleep at night, a kindly Lao man peasant approached me and guided me through the many branches to find the village with the road. I emerged about ninety minutes after the others, and was greeted with mixed perplexity and relief. Four jarring hours later, we were back in Huay Xai.
The Slow Boat to Luang Prabang The next morning, I and my new friends from The Gibbon Experience boarded a very crowded boat on the Mekong River that takes two days to reach Laos' most popular city for tourists, Luang Prabang. Another option is to take the fast boat, which gets you there in one long, harrowing day, but the experience sounded terrifying: It's hard to absorb the atmosphere of the languid Mekong river when you are clutching the lip of the boat for dear life. The motorcycle helmets they put on the passengers do little to muffle the deafening whine of the speedboat motor, nor did they instill any confidence in the safety on the boat. No, it was the slow
boat for us, dictated by the gentle, muddy flow of the Mekong. The trip is sunny and offers beautiful views of river-sculpted rocks, rural bamboo huts and rustic floodplain-based farming, my enjoyment mitigated only by the near-constant pain that I felt in my butt from sitting on the narrow wooden benches.
On the evening of the second day, we pulled in to the charming, proud former French colonial city of Luang Prabang, where I shall pick up next time.
Best Wishes,
Dan
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Caroline Riegel, no relation
non-member comment
SO JEALOUS
If I ever make it out to Laos, I will be sure to try the Gibbon Experience!