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Published: November 12th 2008
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These are the mornings I look forward to least on Holiday.
Up at 5.30am to get ready for a trip up to "Flight of the Gibbon" essentially a treetop trek with zip lines through the tree canopies with some rope bridges and abseiling thrown in.
Our pickup is bang on time which means no Brekkie for us so we are glad that we have snaffled the fruit bowl from our room and got an ice cold bottle of water and some cans of iced coffee for the 55km trip.
We arrive sometime after 9am having had to endure the Chiang Mai rush hour and then some of the nastiest hairpin bends we have ever seen. Our driver beeps his horn at every one which is actually quite reassuring as the Thais do seem to have a very strange attitude to road safety.
The site is very well run and we are soon harnessed up, feeling a bit like some ill fitting bondage gear.
A brief talk on the do's and dont's and we set off for a short ride up to our starting point.
We are already quite high up overlooking canopies of trees in
the valleys below. The views are stunning and probably the coolest we have been in Thailand, just pleasantly warm.
A quick trundle through the paths and we come across our first platform. Thankfully we are in a group where no one had been on a zip line before so the lack of enthusiasm to be first was to be expected.
The guides are consumate experts though and soon have us all on the platform and ready to fly.
Soon we are all flying across the first of 11 zips for the day and the feeling is incredible. Everyone has clumsy landings, one women gets stuck three quarters of the way across, most people bang their shins or arses on the landing platform!
The third platform is very high indeed and is by far the longest of the day.
I manage to get across spinning uncontrollably landing backwards and quite heavy. I would like to say the view on this was fantastic but was more a dizzy haze of green.
I am just unclipped and secure to the next platform when a scream echoes through the forest, the guides with me are grinning and incoming
Waterfall
About halfway up our trek is Scarlet looking every bit the zip line expert save the look of panic on her face. She lands much better than me, has stopped screaming and with a big smile on her face is ready for the next one! I am walking like John Wayne...
Another few in and everyone is becoming quite expert starting to get used to the timings.
Have done a couple of rope bridges and abseiling also, we now come to the 9th line.
Quite short, no brake needed we are told, this one is fast, it doesnt slow and everyone comes in and uses the tree at the end of the line as a buffer (there is a tyre around it to soften the blow!) Scarlet and myself have gone first here and so we watch with grins on our faces as everyone else comes in. You can tell the guides enjoy this as they are constantly smiling encouraging those yet to come across to make like a bird and flap your arms... As always though whilst funny, we never felt that safety was compromised.
We have been out for over 2 hours but a final abseil down and its all over, just as everyone is getting the hang of it.
A prepared lunch is ready for is back at the headquarters, traditional thai food, very tasty then we are given the oppurtunity to "walk off" our lunch with a quick 30 minute trek up the waterfalls.
This is hard work, the steps are steep and slippy thanks to the waterfall's insistance on splashing water everywhere!
We somehow get to the top of the fourth waterfall to find out that we have to reverse and then go back down again. This sounds easy... Much worse as by now our legs are heavy and like jelly and we have to traverse the same slippery rocks.
We manage to get back to our transport back to town and arrive mid afternoon.
We get ready for the evening where we somehow find the energy to go for a walk although we are both quite achy. A quick stop at a street vendor for some Rotis and thats our lot.
We have some Video to attach but been unable to attach here as web connection is a bit flaky.
Will add to an update page in Bangkok.
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