The Gibbon Chronicles: Day 1

I woke eagerly at 7am in order to pack up, eat a hearty breakfast, and schlep my stuff over to the Gibbon Experience office. Upon arrival they had me watch a very serious (sarcasm) safety video on zip lining and proper jungle etiquette. After the video I had to wait for an hour because there were supposed to be three other people coming in with me that morning, with three more following in the afternoon. The staff could sense my restlessness and decided to ship me out early to the reserve.

The drive took about an 1 hour and 45 minutes where we cruised through villages, mountains, rivers, muddy trenches, and some of the worse roads I have ever seen. We got to the main village and picked up a few guides that were to bring me to base camp which was a 30 minute hike away. We entered the jungle 10 minutes into the hike and the trail was almost tunnel-like because of all the fallen bamboo that held itself over the paths. When we reached base camp, I had already sweat through my clothes from the humidity, heat, and jungle's StairMaster-like path. Here I met Toun, a very important person to this trip that I will get into later.

The guides and I waited two hours for the other six guests to show up and finally, only three showed. I was stuck with a homely French family of three whose parents were visiting their daughter for the first time in over a year since she has been working in Laos (awkwarddd...). Now I was to spend the next 3 days living with them in a tree house in the jungle. The father Marc, was a giant of a man, about 6'2" and at least 230 lbs. He always wore short shorts and tight neon shirts, which was so stereotypically European. The mother Danielle was a smaller woman, slightly overweight, at 5'2" whose fashion sense seemed to be stuck in that transition where the 80's met the 90's. Bright pants accompanied by T shirts that had a mixture of basic geometric shapes, neon slash marks and polka-dots. They mostly resembled 90's car decals. And the daughter Fanny, also slightly overweight but slightly more modern than the parents. After a quick introduction, we again entered the jungle en route for our new home, Tree House 1.

To get to Tree House 1, we had to hike for about 15 minutes up into the mountains where we then zip lined through the front door. This was so cool! We put our stuff down, got acquainted with the massive tree house and set off on a short tour of the jungle. This took us about two hours switching between hiking up the mountains and zip lining down to various sites. On this trek, the zip lines were between 620ft-980ft long, 140ft-300ft high, and lasted around 10-20 seconds. To end the trek, we zip lined our way back to the guest house while watching the sun set which was absolutely amazing.

Back at the guesthouse we all got cleaned up and sat down for dinner which was incredibly awkward for me because aside from being the odd man out and completely imposing on this family getaway, only the daughter spoke fluent English. I thought I was saved when the founder showed up (which he never does) and brought a bottle of wine with him. But he too was french! So I sat there speaking only every now and then because everyone was talking in french the entire time while Fanny intermittently translated for me.

Oh and it gets better! I forgot to mention that there is a cat named Milo living in the tree house. For those of you who don't know, I am very allergic to cats, so I spent the entire night not knowing what anyone was saying while I sneezing every 5 minutes and scratching everywhere the cat hair touched on my body.

By 9pm I was exhausted and we all made our way to bed.