gibbonzz

welcome to my first ever blog!

to start right in the middle, here is the site of the first dive i made into the jungle... on a zip line 120 meters above ground: a 500-meter span between two mountainsides. it was late afternoon and I had been looking forward to any more relaxing kind of transportation after a three-hour, straight-uphill hike through the jungle mountains in northern Laos.

i was scared to death until i actually jumped and the scenery was too spectacular to consider fear. after this zip-line, the girls and I made a few more zips (pronounced 'jeeps' by our Lao guide Sang Keo) into a treehouse at canopy level, complete with two stories, one for the toilet, and guess what--Shower. there was nothing like a shower 100 meters in the air, watching water fall a long ways through the lattice work under my feet. we hiked down to a waterfall after this, where Sang Keo began bathing and brushing his teeth. this guy was truly unique, like an animal-child-gibbon. this whole excursion, by the way, is called the Gibbon Experience. gibbons (and other animals who'd been poached) are re-introduced into the wild, and our and others' trips pay for maintenance etc.

all in all there were 9 of us, plus our two Lao guides. much gruelling hiking through bamboo and palm, amazing raw food like sticky rice and fruits grown right in the Bokeo reserve, and about 50 zip lines all together.