The Gibbon Experience, Laos

I pushed and dragged my bike up the hill, away from the river, away from the mayhem that was the Laos border crossing on the Mekong. Passports flying everywhere, stamps, and the good old USD.

So strange to see your own currency again.

Hey there Mr. Andrew Jackson, I forgot all about you! I’ve been busy playing with monopoly money!

Dusty, and broken looking: Houay Xai (spelled any number of ways you please).

Greeted by cobra filled liquor bottles, and rust filled everything, one once again came to grips with the sight of poverty. India swept over me for at least a full minute.

Apparently, a stroll to the left was to bring me to the office of The Gibbon Experience, which was what had pressed me to Northern Laos in a timely fashion, to meet up with my one and only booking for this trip, on January 26th.

Thoughts of their warm, elegant website came to mind as I wheeled down the road…and not a second later, there I was:

Hmm.

Well. Seven personal recommendations can’t be wrong, right?

Research for Southeast Asia for me went as follows:

1) Look at the map: Where is the ocean? Where are the mountains? Rivers? Check.

2) Configure cycling feasibility: which major highways are too major? Which minor roads are too minor (i.e. rock, dust, holes, holes of rocks and dust).

3) Email all trusted travel friends in and around the region and tally up the results.

Emails came flying back, and almost all of them had one thing in common: The Gibbon Experience.

No, not the one in Thailand: the one in Laos, in the Bokeo Reserve.

So: departure time 8:00am, the neatly dressed Laotian woman told me.

8:00am, 8 people per day, three days.

The truck pulled up bright and early, and 8 sleepy eyed travelers, two Dutch, four Australian, one Philipino-American, and me, the quintessential mutt-American (i.e. Italian-Lebanese-Irish-Polish-American) went hurtling down the road.

(and over the river—literally—and through the woods).

Two hours later, the truck dragged into a village of bamboo huts, at least 32 children, and our “guides,” two Hmong boys, Pochua and Piyja. Without much fanfare (partially due to the enormous language barrier between ourselves and our guides), we began our first of many treks, into the bamboo jungle of the Bokeo Reserve.

I was psyched. The trail was almost non-existent, with thick bamboo stalks draped over us, and ferns brushing our ankles, as we pushed our way through. Baguettes (the strangely common place bread of choice for French colonized Laos) were distributed early on, before we moved deeper into the reserve to a waterfall for a dip.

And then, the zip line.

The zip line!

Just you wait til I have enough internet juice to upload my videos!

Zipping from treehouse to treehouse over the canopy (our official resting places each night) we explored the jungle between, by way of our machete wielding 17 year old Piyja. The paths were almost absolutely uncut, at points, and with the dense, wet, bamboo, cracking and shifting, new routes were established on an hourly basis. This was trekking at its finest. These boys knew the forest like the backs of their hands.

But not so far off, the rumbling started. Mid day, and the sky pitch black. Our guides exchanging looks and rattling on in Laos. Within minutes, the sky was falling. Pushing us into a huddled group, we threw up our hoods if we had them, and were pelted, pelted, pelted by rain.

Until the rain turned to hail.

The size of golf balls.

The ten of us, bunched together, as we heard trees, six stories high, snapping under the force of the wind, we shook and giggled through the sounds of ice hitting our heads with a hollow pop.

Only appropriate to laugh when you could be smashed by a tree at any moment, right?

And like that, it was gone. Pochua gave a clear sigh of relief, and we all exchanged looks….wtf.

A tree crashed on the zip line, meaning a trek down to the jungle floor and a full on crawl back up, once again, through the river, feet stomping through, absolutely soaked to the core.

Our final zip to our resting place for the night, a full on drop from the perch, I prayed my straps were tight enough, that my clips were secure, that the old motorbike tire of a “brake” was enough to stop me before slamming into a tree on the other end. The wind would whip by, and if it weren’t for the hum of the line as you sailed, you would think you were flying.

Over snacks of jujubes, tamarind pods, apples, and baguettes (that had clearly been sat on all afternoon) we exchanged “how we got here-where we came from” stories, before dinner was zip line delivered in stacked tiffins and traditional woven rice holders.

The two blonde and beautiful Dutch girls, Susanne and Judith, spoke of growing up around Amsterdam, while Team Australia (although, also strongly linked to both African and Jewish descent), were a group of boys, all around 19 and 20, travelling after their first year of Uni, and then our beloved Alex, the Philipino born, San Francsico living, Phd holding, joy of a man, with amazing spectacles, and a smile that even the Thai people would have trouble contesting.

The guide boys explained to me how to turn on the stove for tea, where the candles were, and how to set up the mosquito nets (apparently, I was dubbed mother hen), and off they went, leaving us campers to our own devices, in the middle of the jungle, without so much as a wave goodbye.

And just like that, we hunkered down for our first night alone in the jungle. No phones, no first aid kits, just a treehouse in the middle of the middle of nowhere, with a toilet that was home to the best view of the whole lot, at least six resident rats, and a lizard the size of my forearm.

Yes, the name of this trip is the Gibbon Experience, and certainly, we were engulfed in wildlife, unimaginable, from giant Hornbills, to the Slow Loris, but in all honesty, the reality of a wildlife trek is that your trekking is the very thing that will drive away all things wild before you even catch a glimpse. It is best, instead, to keep your ears open (as we did, actually, hearing the Gibbons calling out).

This is of no fault of the trekking company, but solely the fault of being a stinky human with clumsy feet. Gibbon sightings do, however, occur every week on this trek, since apparently, there are early morning feedings that bring them to a certain, accessible area. Day three of our trek was dedicated to creeping around the jungle on tiptoe, dodging twig-snapping steps, and blinking our eyes in the 6:30am sun.

Two more full days of trekking, zipping, steamed rice and vegetables for breakfast-lunch-and-dinner, before moving into the dried up paddies themselves, and somehow back to the village, and back to our truck for a rumbling drive back to the border town...