Michelle and Brent

Thursday, February 28, 2008 - 430
So here I will attempt to describe how incredible this experience actually was. Although words will not do this trip justice, I will try. The Gibbons Experience takes place in a nature reserve in the effort of promoting conservation and giving jobs to local villagers in Laos.
We arrived at the office in Huay Xai at 8am for a brief movie on safety during the experience. We then got in a truck and drove for about 1.5 hours on a newly paved, but very winding road. After that was a dirt road for another half an hour. This brought us to a small village at the base of some very large hills (I won't call them mountains exactly, but they were close) within the Bokeo Nature Reserve. At this point we still did not really know what was in store for us. We had an idea of some hiking, and some zip lining, but nothing compared to what was actually in store. We left in a group of 8 people, plus 2 guides. The initial hike took about 2-3 hours, mostly on an incline as we needed to be high enough to access the canopy. During that 2-3 hours, we stopped to get our harnesses and another briefing about safety and what actually to expect. Shortly after the break, we reached the first zip line, and off we went, one at a time across the gully to the other side. We were 30-50 metres above the ground, clearing trees, flying ABOVE the canopy to another platform on the other side. The feeling is indescribable. The views were amazing and we couldn't help but let out a huge WEEEEEE (or in Michelle's case a giggle) on each zip. After a few more zips and some more uphill trekking we reached the first treehouse, where we were to spend the first night. Ziiip, in we went to a wooden treehouse (essentially a grown up tree fort) about 35 metres above the ground. The only way in and out was through the use of the zip wires, so needless to say we spent considerable time going in and out, getting familiarized with the system. After the first zip, the guides basically let us go on our own and gave no more help. It was very liberating, but a little scary.
Nighttime in a treehouse in the middle of the jungle is not all that exciting, but enjoyable a we had a good group of people (all about our age). We played cards all night, and went to bed around 10. The treehouse was equipped with a toilet (that simply drained below into the trees), running water (suitable for drinking, from a natural spring), and food and snacks that seemed endless (coming from the "kitchen" which was down on the ground, a short zip away). The next morning we got up early to go "animal watching", which turned out to be almost a jog through the jungle in which we didn't see any animals. Then after breakfast we packed up and headed out in search of our next destination, another treehouse with a waterfall nearby. It was another long hike (2-3 hours), but was broken up by several amazing zips! The longest of which was about 500 metres. This translates into about 1 full minute of flying. It was the slightly shorter 400 metre zip which took the cake as the most exhilerating experience of the trip. It was extremely high up, with views of the entire gully below. A river down to the right, trees as far as the eye can see, and a view of one of the treehouses from above down to the left...INCREDIBLE. We then took a swim in the waterfall ponds (quite cold, but nice) and had some lunch. After settling in to our second treehouse, we took advantage of some free time and zipped around for about 2 hours with a couple other tourists, but no guides. This was the best part of the experience by far. So much freedom, and excitement, and above all pure fun! At night we had some dinner, hot drinks and chatted with the others by candlelight. There was no running water in this treehouse, but there will be in the next few days as the project is growing.
During the night I (Brent) became quite ill for a still unknown reason and vomitted numerous times over the side of the treehouse. I had the shakes, a serious pain in my stomach and was generally unwell. Nobody else in our group of 8 was affected. This made the morning a little more difficult for me, but Michelle took good care of me, and it turned out to be ok. We had a nice slow, downward hike in the rain for 2-3 hours again, which brought us back to the village to wait for the trucks.

Overall, the zipping was one of the coolest things I have ever done, and although we did not manage to see any Gibbons Monkeys (hence the name, Gibbons Experience), this was a fantastic time for both of us. As far as conservation efforts goes, this is a good program as it gives jobs to otherwise jobless Lao people, and provides some support for a nature reserve that is threatened by logging and poor agricultural practices.

It is doubtful that anything else we do on this trip will be as enjoyable as this, but thats ok because these memories and experiences will fulfill us for a long time to come.

From here we are travelling through Laos a little bit (locations T.B.D.) before heading back to Bangkok for our flight to New Delhi, India on March 5.

-Brent

Thursday February 28, 2008, 4 pm
Greetings!!
Have we ever done alot since our last post. We left Bangkok, as we intended on the overnight train. It took about 14.5 hours. It left at 10pm and arrived at 12:30 the next day. Our cabin was open (not airconditioned) which ment that I had the window open almost all night blowing on me while I slept. Very breezy and pleasant. When we arrived we checked into a nice place called S.D. Guesthouse and after a shower we booked a trekking overnight up to a hill tribe complete with elephant riding and rafting. Here on this side of the world they call hiking trekking. So, we booked an over night hike up to a hilltribe. Hilltribe peoples are a group of people still living in a very rural and traditional way up in the northern hills of Thailand. That evening unbelievably we ran into our English friends who we last saw in Krabi (Thailand) and who we had met in Singapore.
The Trekk was really good fun. We spend the first day hiking straight up a mountain for about 1.5 hours and then, sadly, back down, and along to a rural farming village. We were with a group of 8 people and 2 guides. We had some challenges with an older, crazy man from Japan who had minimal english skills and was very eccentric. By eccentric I mean whenever we stopped anywhere, the first thing he would do was to chug a can of beer, he downed a bottle of whisky in one evening sitting, and would make everyone shot glasses of bamboo leaves and force you to drink. He also had a huge knife which he liked to chop things with and during the rafting, had no interest in paddling when the guide would yell "paddle hard." That night we all slept in a bamboo and palmtree hut after watching a traditional Karen tribe dance performed by some of the women.
The next day we hiked some more, rode elephants, which was the highlight of the whole trip and rafted down a river. It was a pretty good break in trip for the Gibbon Experience we were preparing to do in Laos.
After Chiang Mai, we took a bus to Chiang Rai, about 4 hours further north and en route to Laos. Chiang Rai had a wonderful evening market, with traditional dancers and musicians playing on 2 different stages and vendors and food stall all in the middle. I bought myself a necklace. We spent one evening in Chiang Rai and the moved on into Laos the next day. We crossed from Thailand to Laos at Chiang Khong to the town of Houay Xai. We arrived one day early for our Gibbons Trip which was OK as we both had some laundry to do and enjoyed the day of relaxing and catching up on the world news with the BBC on one of our first TVs. We also found out upon enterring that Canadians have to pay the most of any other country in the world to get a visa to Laos. We asked the reason for this, and found out that it was because for Lao people to come to Canada, it was the same.

Hope everyone is well back at home.
Lots of Love
Michelle

Tuesday February 19, 2008 3pm
We are still here in Bangkok, but not for much longer.
We leave tonight on the night train to Chang Mai, which is exciting for us as we are getting a little tired of this city, specifically our filthy street. It is always full of travellers, hawkers, food stalls, and garbage (quite smelly).
We have made some progress on the planning of the rest of our trip. Today we paid the deposit for the Gibbons Experience, which was nothing compared to the money we just spent on our plane tickets to India! We are leaving on March 5th from Bangkok at 2:40am, and arriving in New Delhi sometime around 7am. Great news. No need for a guest house/hostel that night, as the airport will serve just fine! The cost of this plane ride does not really break the bank, however it just seems like a lot compared to what we have been spending in this very inexpensive part of the world.
We sent home a package yesterday after spending the weekend shopping our brains out at the market. From the approximately 15,000 stalls, while weaving through hoards of people, I managed to buy 6 t-shirts (for about $25-30 total) and Michelle got a bag, a dress, a pair of shorts and a couple shirts. Along with some of the purchases, we also sent home some things we were not using very much, but did not want to throw out (or give away/leave behind).

Our train leaves tonight at 10, so we are just trying to kill some time.

We will keep you all posted.

Brent

Sunday February 17, 1 pm.
Hello to everyone from Bangkok.
We made it to Bangkok from Koh Tao by ferry and train 3 days ago. The ferry was pleasant, but very cold because we stayed in the air conditioned cabin most of the time. They were showing the movie War, but it was hard to understand as the subtitles were very off and the volume quite low. We have decovered that chain smokers takeover the outside decks of all the ferrys and we laugh at ourselves because were are some of the only non-chain smoking travellers, and because we are Canadian and spoilled with all our non-smoking spaces in Canada, we believe that we have the right to breathe fresh air. The cabins are non-smoking and so we stayed in there most of the time.
When we reached Chumpon, the port city on the mainland, we had 6 hours to kill before our overnight train. We wandered the streets of an busy night market, sampled some foods and hung around. We met 2 guys, one from Laurier who had graduated in June and was spending the year in China studying Chinese. He was a great help when we arrived in Bangkok and showed us to a nice hostel called Mom's guesthouse on Kho San road.
The train ride was quite pleasent, we didnt have a sleeper cabin, but we boarded at 11:30 and arrived at 6am so the few hours sleeping in seats was OK. We are going to get a sleeper cabin for our train trip to Chang Mai, northern Thailand, in the next day or 2.
Our check-in wasnt until noon the day we arrived in Bangkok, so we left our bags in the hostel and parked ourselves in a cafe with the two guys we had meet and watched the city come to life. We spent the rest of the day wandering around, exploring and napping. That afternoon we took a tuk tuk. Big mistake. He took us to some fancy jewllery store and tailor-shop, and they basically told use to leave because they could tell we were not seriously considering buying anything. our driver took us there because he gets free gas from the owners of the shops for bringing tourists in that will spend money. since we didn't, he got mad and took us back to where he had picked us up. I refused to pay him because we didn't go anywhere, and he was not pleased, but it worked out in the end, we got a free trip aroubnd town a little, but still, it was all very perplexing.
Yesterday we did some major shopping. We caught a river boat from Banglampu, the area our guest house is in to the Central Station. We the hopped on the sky train and our first stop was Siam Square, and major fancy shopping complex. We then went to the electronic mall, Pantip Plaza, in the hopes of getting a mini DVD player, but didnt love the prices, so are still thinking about that purchase. We hopped back on the sky train and made our way to the weekend market, one of the craziest places we have experienced so far. You can find absolutly anything you could thnk of buying at the massive market. Once inside, if took us a long time to figue out how to get out. There was everything from puppies, to clothing, shoes, food, furniture, all things useful and useless. Crazy! After some exciting purchases, tshirts for Brent, a bag and dress for me we went back to Siam Square , had dinner and went to see American Gangster.
Both are stomachs are up and down these days, but I am taking it easier on the food tasting right now, and feeling better already.
Hope all is well at home.
Michelle

Tuesday February 12, 2008. 8:30pm

So we are here in beautiful Koh Tao right now, which is one of the premier dive sites in the world. It is a small island on the east coast of Thailand where there are barely any inhabitants of local people, and the ones that do live here are all running the tourism. However, unlike Phi Phi on the other side, things here are still very reasonably priced, and it is not a wild and crazy frat party. It is pretty nice and calm, small beaches, nice views and again, hot sun. We arrived here yesterday and found a small bungalow that we are now calling home for the price of 350 baht per night (about 9 dollars). It is one of the nicer rooms we have had so far and we are enjoying it thoroughly. Tomorrow we are heading out on a full day trip around the island that will include a lot of snorkelling, since we are not qualified divers. Tonight, after we finish writing this, we will be heading to the Muai Thai Boxing Arena for a good ol' fashioned blood bath. There are 8 fights scheduled for tonight, and Michelle and I have been excited to see one for quite some time. Hopefully tomorrow night we will get a chance to watch the spectacular Cabaret that they have here on the island featuring exclusively Ladyboys...for those you unfamiliar with that term, it is a man-woman (men who live their lives as women, quite prevalent here in Thailand). Last night we watched Ratatouille at the restaurant we went to after my meal never came to me at the first one. It all worked out well in the end, because the movie was great!

Before coming to this island, we were in Ko Pha Ngan for a few days. We rented motorbikes (with helmets don't worry) and cruised around the island. We played on the beach, swung in the hammock out front of our bungalow, and enjoyed some BBQ'd seafood while sitting right on the sandy beach. It was extremely nice, relaxing and very cheap. That particular island is home to the infamous full moon parties, however we will not be around too enjoy it this month, but we may consider trying to make it to another one. The ferry boats we have taken from Surath Thani and Ko Pha Ngan have been loads better than the other ones. However the bus from Phuket was unbearably long, hot, and crowded. There were people standing in the isles for hours because the bus picked everyone up, and despite being a coach bus, there were 3 and 4 to a seat in some cases, and as I said, people standing. Then we had to take a tuk-tuk (type of cab) to the port, which was an hour away from where the bus dropped us. During that ride, which we shared with three british chain-smokers, our drunk driving chauffeur was rifling through Michelle's pack, as well as one of the Brit's in the front seat. Luckily she had taken everything of value out of that one, and is a good packer, so he could not find much, other than a few pairs of underwear and a flashlight. He then had the nerve to ask us for a tip at the end.
Needless to say that put a sour taste in our mouths, but travel up to and since then has been relatively alright, so we are just taking it as a bump in the road.

From here we will be ferrying over to Chumpon in a couple days, then up to Bangkok via a night train or bus, depending on times, costs and availability.

Until the next,

Brent

PS: I found a gym here on Koh Tao and worked out for real today which was quite lovely. Pushups and stretch band work can only be so exciting.