Zipping with the gibbons

Laos is one of those special corners in the world where you can use the words "ziplines," "gibbons," "treehouses," and "rainforest canopy" together in a sentence and no one will think differently of you. For the past year and a half, a different type of tour called the Gibbon Experience has been set up in the Bokeo Reserve in northwestern Laos- right next to the Thailand border.

As you might guess, there were treehouses in the rainforest canopy that you could stay overnight in. As an added incentive, you get to also confront your fear of heights by ziplining into and out of the treehouses. Treehouses and ziplines! It just doesn't get any better than that.

A forest guide helping Anna hook her harness onto the zipline for the first time.

And then you take a deep breathe, step off the platform...



These weren't just tiny ziplines with safety nets either. The treehouses were at least 30 meters from the forest ground, and on a few ziplines over a valley, you probably were closer to 100 meters up in the air. Most ziplines took a good 30 seconds to get across.


And unfortunately, you don't quite make it all the way to the end of the line most of the time. You just kinda dangle in mid-air until you go hand over hand on the line to the platform on the end. I knew I should have added some extra weight before doing this.

Err... just ignore the short-shorts on the G-man until I can photoshop them out, hah!



Living in a treehouse is kinda like reliving a childhood dream. You just can't believe you're doing it half the time. The cooks and guides would deliver us food and water by zipping into the treehouse. I wonder if Dominoes delivers this way too...
Treehouse 2

Treehouse 4

Inside a treehouse.


It would get pitch black at around 7pm, so what did we do then? Nocturnal ziplining of course! It pretty much goes against every survival instinct to step off a creaky wooden platform into complete darkness, but man, what a rush! We were well prepared when the guides wanted us to come down because of an incoming thunder storm. I'm guessing a treehouse and a metal line are not good places to be with lightning nearby.

We didn't see any gibbons, but we heard them singing to each other early in the morning. We would wake up to mist covered tropical rainforests, definitely made the speedboat journey from hell worth it.

In the instuction folder, it said to avoid hitting gibbons on the ziplines, which I guess must have happened before. Apparently, there was one gibbon that liked to hang from the ziplines.

The organizers of the Gibbon Experience built treehouses and ziplines in the reserve as a way to generate revenue for local villages and pay for badly needed forest guards. The reserve has been heavily used by hunters to illegally traffic animal parts to China and other asian countries, and the habitat of the gibbons were being seriously threatened.

This 2-month asiatic bear cub was a handful. It liked to do sneak attacks on shoe laces and gnaw on shoe leather. It's mother was likely killed by poachers for body parts to be shipped to China or Vietnam. It's hard to ignore the role of economics in conservation efforts.


Belly rub