High

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Its been some week since the last update and I feel this entry is going to be a monster, so apologies in advance.. Seems like months ago now but we spent last weekend in Luang Prabang, the second city of Laos. Unfortunately, as a result of our shenanagians in Vang Vieng we only had 2 days which was probably not enough to enjoy the picturesque little french colonial town which is a world heritage site, surrounded by two rivers and rolling green hills.

Come to think of it, we all thought 3 weeks was more than enough time for Laos when we rocked up to the airport in Pakse. The only thing I knew about the country before arriving was that Laos held the distinction of being the most bombed country on earth (Not sure how often this table gets updated but I am sure Iraq must be running it close now!) due to the Americans carpet bombing of the east of the country to root out the Viet Cong hiding there during the Vietnam war. After our time here we all fell in love with the country and the people and it seems like we left with so much more to see. I don't think we could visit a more scenic country in the world if we travelled till we were 80, and like the Cambodians before them the people just bowl you over with their good humour and friendliness.

Luang Prabang has more 'Wats' than you can shake a stick at and we were beginning to a bit "templed-out" (once you've seen one Buddha..), but even so the one in the centre of town on the hill was well worth the climb simply for the view. Went up there one night and got chatting to a couple of young monks or 'monklings' I think they are known... nice lads they were too although when they said their names were "Pan" and "Da", I began to feel like they might have been having a laugh at my expense. I am no stranger to having the piss pulled, but by monks, now thats a first..! Going into a monastry at the age of 14/15 is often the only way for these young lads to get an education and learn english. Where's the catch you might ask, well while all their teenage mates are off drinking Beer Lao and chasing girls they are up at 4 every morning for some chanting!

We were all still wrecks after the maddness that preceded so the chance to chill out for a few days was appealing. Pubs close early in Laos, and most have turfed you out the door by 11 and to be honest that suits this little town just fine. The pace of life is probably slower here than anywhere else I have ever been, its like everything moves in slow motion. It's said that the P.D.R. of Laos (Peoples Democratic Republic) actually stands for Please Don't Rush! The FA Cup final on Saturday night was a cracker, every backpacker in town was in the one pub and almost all were Hammers for the night, although you couldn't help but jump up at the end for Stevie G's belter.

Left the lads on Sunday and hired a mountain bike to see a bit of the surroundings. Its always a great way to discover a place and I saw some of the villages that supply the town's famous night market with materials. If you ever find yourself short of a duvet cover, pillow case, sheet, table cloth or lampshade, Luang Prabang is your place! Not really suitable for backpacking though so only left with a sheet of elephant dung paper, that's going to be someone's Christmas present this year!

Luang Prabang's crown jewel though is the waterfall 30km from town. It is absolutely stunning and I bet the pictures won't do the size justice but you feel like you are in the middle of a Timotei advert when you are swimming around in the turquoise pool at the bottom, well worth the bumpy minibus ride out there.

We met Seth (of 'Days of our Lives' fame) again who must have thought we were stalking him at this stage and he told us about the monks procession every morning in the town at 6am. Basically the monks from the surrounding wats all come to collect food from the local communities early everyday. Hundreds of them march through the streets and collect rice and other sweeties from locals and tourists. This is a regular occurance in most towns in Laos, monks are held in high regard and this is how they get enough food to cook for the day. So it was with a weary head that I hauled myself up on the last morning to see what all the fuss was about... bought my basket of rice and gave a fingerful to as many as I could until I ran out. Even saw Pan and Da, although I am sure I saw them smirking!

The date for the highlight of our trip - the Gibbon Experience, had been set long before so we had to be in Huay Xiah for Wednesday 17th. There were two options for getting there: (1) A slow boat taking 2 days with a stopover in a standard dead-end town on the Mekong, or (2) A 5 hour speed boat, where you sit with your head between your legs wearing a helmet while an engine roars at deafening volume just under you, and oh yes it has a high fatality rate....

As you can see option 2 was never really a runner, but we saw some of the poor divils roaring by on our boat and by their terrified faces looked like they were having the worst 5 hrs of their lives. In the end it wasn't too bad and although the wooden benchs and splinters on our arses on the first day wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs we did meet a good bunch and had more than a few games of card to pass the hours with Nick from Leeds, Jim and Andrew from Tasmania and Brigeena and Niamh from Tipp. The stopover town of Pakbeng wasn't as bad as I'd feared we had no rats chewing our bags (although others weren't so lucky), no kids stealing our stuff, no policemen disguised as drugdealers trying to swindle us and no food poisoning.

We arrived in HuayXai in good spirits and raring to go on the 'Gibbon Experience'. This was one of the main reasons I had come travelling in the first place thanks to one man. Joe Beatty's emails were always classics and as travel writing goes I am not fit to lace his boots. They were print-off and take on the tube material and enough to give any city worker itchy feet but the email about the Gibbon Experience was probably the best I have ever received and did more than anything to make me up sticks.

Next morning, 19 of us lined up outsde the office and anxiously eyed up the uncomfortable looking 'Suengthaew' (Suengthaew literally means 'two rows' referring to the two wooden benches facing each other in the back, not the lap of luxury!) waiting to transport us the 81km up to the jungle. They had sold it to us as an uncomfortable muddy or dusty 3 hour trip, or in other words, hell, and they weren't far off. After a months travelling though we now have buns of steel so this was nothing! To be fair the Aussie couple sitting across from us did make it entertaining, they looked a bit rough at the start but had hearts of gold and after sussing out if we were vegetarians or not (they don't like them much) they ended up being good craic and even inviting me to their house in Perth for a barbie and some foul-sounding rum called Bundys. The only other passenger was Tommy, a Polish American from Arizona, who had been mad enough to spend the last 18 months as a contractor in Iraq and earned enough to travel on for a while yet. When your work used to involve a weekly commute to Baghdad and Falluja, this was nothing...

I felt almost guilty when we got to the village as promised three hours later. Joe had taken 12 hours of sliding through mud and in his own words trekking for 9 long, slow, muddy, hilly, slippy, cold, wet, dense, harsh, hip-grinding, thigh-pushing, spirit-crushing kilometres! It had been a walk in the park for us. Just lucky with the weather we had I guess.. From there it was a short hour walk up to treehouse 1 ("TH1")

In the end we never got to meet the Frenchman who was the inspiration behind it. Jean-Francois had lived here for 10 years and long since fallen in love with Laos. Yet he had struggled for years to think of an idea to help protect the forest and the wildlife he loved and allow the locals to make a living from something other than poaching, difficult in a location as remote as this, they were destroying their environment through the need to make a living. When he suddenly had the brainwave to build 4 treehouses, as far away from civilisation as possible, hundreds of feet up in the air, across green jungle valleys and join them up with cables to allow you to travel by zipline, you can only imagine the looks the locals would have given him! But he made it happen and now has a totally unique ecotourism experience that allows him to employ locals and give them a credible alternative to poaching and protect the wildlife that lives there. When the project is finally over and several more villages and treehouses have been included the plan is to hand over to the locals to run for themselves.

At 100EUR for 3 days it ain't cheap in backpacker terms, but I can't think of a better spent 100 yoyo's in my life. It all runs itself quite well, it's doesn't appear in the lonely planet and nor do they want it to. For the moment they are doing quite nicely through word of mouth and this acts as a sort of vetting process making sure they get people who really are interested in doing it for the right reasons and are prepared a more for the benefit it gives the area. In a past life, a bitter and cynical me sitting at a London desk might have dismissed them as a bunch of 'treehuggers' but most of the volunteers love what they do and are happy to help the Laos people. Mozzies and dodgy food aside I can think of worse workplaces....

Anyway enough drivel... after all the talking and trekking it was time to do what we all came here for, the ziplines. The ziplines are brilliantly simple, a cable had been stretched across the jungle valleys from one platform or tree to another. Wearing a sort of rock-climbing harness you simply hooked on the harness to the rollers, leant back and jumped off. The rollers click in and before you know it you are flying across the jungle rooftop with a loud mmmmmm. The first time you do it it is impossible not to shout a "wooooohooooo" as the adrenalin kicks in and you realised just where the hell you were. Without fail you come off out-of-breath and beaming as you glide onto the plaform at the other end, wishing it could have gone on longer and yelling "OK" to the next zipper.

We opted for the 'Waterfall' experience, the more energetic of the two available to us which basically involved a bit more trekking though the jungle. The furthest treehouse (TH4) had the added attraction of a waterfall and pool below it. The trek though wasn't for the faint hearted and poor old Tommy had never experienced the likes even when running away from insurgents in Iraq and was fecked by the end of it! Added to that we had to keep vigilant all the way and keep flicking off leeches off your shoes as the place was riddled with them. Basically they are like little slinkys and they attach themselves to your boot and climb up till they find some skin and attach themselves on. I was lucky and avoided any but the lads were all nabbed at various stages. The swim in the pool below our new home though made the trip worthwhile, this was also our shower, sink and washing machine! You can imagine the hunger we had on is at this stage but the Laotian Gordon Ramsay cook us up a storm of buffalo, chillis, spuds and greens.

Nights in the jungle are quite the experience. By 7 the sun has gone down, and candles come out for a game of cards, but within an hour or so the bugs are getting to you so much you have to retreat in under the mosquito net and call it a day. Just as well too because there is no chance of you sleeping in next morning, the bugs, rats, birds, monkeys and God-knows what else make sure of that.. The one disappointment of the trip was that we didn't see many animals in the jungle, apart from the odd millipede, bird, and leech but none of the famous gibbons. You did however hear them every morning singing from about 5am, we had been told it was beautiful and it was but it sounded a bit like Star Wars for 2 hours every morning and there was no way you were sleeping through this morning chorus. At night, as soon as the candles were blown out and you had tucked in the mosquito net around your bed you could hear the rats scratching about outside for foodscraps and shrieking away to themselves. Jungle life right enough!

After the trek back next day we were given a "carte blanche" to explore the area and zip to our hearts content and thats exactly what we did. It is quite possibly the best ever way to spend an afternoon. There were 7 or 8 of them in all but the Daddy of them all was the 200m long, 400m high cable bridging a massive valley over the forest. We all loved it, I am having withdrawal symptoms for the ziplines since we left, nothing like gliding through the mist to wake you up in the morning...

We spent 2 nights and one full day in the jungle and by the time we came out we were filthy, stinking, badly in need of a hot shower and a shave (myself and Martin had decided in our wisdom to become proper jungle men and not shaved fo 2 weeks but now it was driving me mad and it had to go!), also after 3 days of veg and fruit there wasn't one of us not dying for a massive burger and a cold beer. But it was overall one of the experiences of a lifetime and not something I am likely to get the chance to do ever again..
I have new found respect for all those poor celebrities dropped off in the jungle, and we didn't even have to eat any bugs!

The journey back wasn't much better than 3 days before. We overloaded the old 2-wheel drive sangtheaw and all had to disembark and walk up any steep hills in the blistering sun. By the time we had lost some weight in the form of 3 passengers the driver was a man possessed so we were being banged around in the back in the middle of a duststorm - a shower was never so badly needed!

So we find ourselves in the lovely city of Chang Mai now. Spent the last 2 days doing absolutely nothing and loving it. Feels good to be back in civilisation, internet, throne toilets, good food, tv, champions league final highlights...heaven!

Saturday night was a cracker. We formed the Chang Mai branch of the Munster supporters club in the originally named "Irish Pub" and even drafted in some Aussie, English and Thai supporters. By the end everyone was riveted and the roar that greeted the final whistle could only have been matched in O'Connell St and Cardiff! Followed by singsong as standard. For the first time on my travels I was jealous as hell of all you lot at home, would love to have been there for it.

Loads planned for the week and we've put down roots here till the weekend..

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Photos

Breathe In
I'm trying to get in that waterfall in the background

Crouching tiger...
...Hidden Cameraman. Fortunately that's a fence betweeen me and the big girl

Freeloaders
Monks not ashamed to accept handouts

Orange Walk
Non-violent kind out here... The King Billy on a charger flag is just out of shot

Familiar photo
Me and waterfalls

No' happy
If you don't buy a bracelet, you're not gonna get a smile

All smiles before the jungle
Gibbon crew ready to go

Nobody said it was easy
I'm I beginning to sound just like Chris Martin?

Zipping In
I could get used to this

Lambourn Lads
God we stink

'Oi!
You're not supposed to be doing that!

Battle wounds
Bugsy succumbs to the critters of the forest

View from the treehouse
Latest score: Waterfalls 15 Sunsets 12

Jungle pets
Fiercer than your average bears...

Jungle food
Familiar

Jungle jacks
Luxurious

Growing a beard?
Or acting the goat?

Laos vehicles
Inadequate