Day 1: Tarzan life (24/02/2019)
The trip from Thailand to Laos was very straight forward, with not many remarks. Get on a bus, walk to the border, pay, wait for another bus, cross a bridge, walk, one more bus, and rest.
Huay Xai, the town at the border, has not much to offer as a town. Most people stop here to take a slow boat through the Mekong that will take them to Luang Prabang. I was tempted to do it, but a friend from the farm (@jackedz89 ) had recommended me something different, the gibbon experience.
It was a bit pricy, but as a ‘Tarzan wannabe’ I had to try it, and you know what YOLO!🐒 For the next couple of days, we would be hiking in the jungle, moving around using zip lines to cross between mountains. And we would spend the night in a treehouse. Exciting!!🤩
I remember that soon after starting the hike through the jungle I saw a goat with two babies. They got scared and the mum goat ran away. One of the babies, decided that I would be her new mum and started to follow me (my own mum used to call me “mountain goat"🐐 when I was younger, so I understand the animal confusion). Luckily we found the real mum and continued our way.
Ziplining over the trees was quite exciting, but there were too many safety rules and at some point became repetitive. I decided to spice things up a little bit trying different flying postures, but the guides didn’t seem to like it🙈.
We arrived at the tree-house to enjoy the sunset from the top. Followed by a quite tasty dinner, and night of games. I especially connected with two amazing couples Kasia & Arame, and Bhav & Rajvi. They had been backpacking for a longer time and served me as inspiration for the subsequent months of my journey (Bhav also had a quite long beard and inspired me to grow mine🧔).
Spending the night in the treehouse was pretty cool but also a bit scary, as that night there was a storm and I could feel the tree shaking. Plus, some rats invaded the house overnight to see if they could steal some food leftovers, and we could hear them running around.🐁
The next morning we woke up early to see the sunrise, and the guides tried to take us to an area where sometimes you can see Gibbons (as expected there was no luck).
In exchange, they showed us a special bark of a tree that is used for fireworks (the video is slowed down, but in real-time you could see the fire in the air for a couple seconds too). After more than 17 long ziplines, we were all exhausted and happy to go back to civilization to keep our adventures going somewhere else.