Living in a Treehouse

So after a couple of weeks gorging on Thai food and massages, we picked up my old roommate Alex Torgovitsky at the Bangkok airport, and caught an overnight bus to the Lao border. To enter Laos, you have to take a small ferry boat across the Mekong River, which is the border between Laos and Thailand. The typical hustlers were there on the Lao side, attempting to convince us that we wanted what they were selling. We didn't, so we ignored them and started hiking around town looking for a place to stay. We noticed immediately that the stray dogs here are in much better condition (less mange, fewer rib bones visible), which we later learned is due to the fact that they are in fact pets, but allowed to roam the streets for the last few months of the dry season, until either bad weather or mating season begins, at which point they are brought into the yard. We bought a few beer Lao at a restaurant overlooking the river and enjoyed our introduction to Lao cuisine (similar to Thai food, but with a Vietnamese influence and less seafood).

Our destination was the jungle. We had paid the equivalent of a year salary for the average Lao worker for a once in a lifetime experience. After a 51/2 hour hike through small villages and jungle along muddy roads and paths, at steep grades both up and down, we arrived exhausted. We were given harnesses, and shown how to attach them to the steel cables. Then, we gave it a go.

The Gibbon Experience is essentially a network of three large treehouses (the biggest holds up to 8 people, and is three stories high), connected via a series of zip-lines and jungle trails. The zip-lines and treehouses are several hundred feet off the jungle floor, amidst the upper canopy. You hook yourself onto the zip-line and hop off the platform, and are taken for a ride, going perhaps as much as 20-30 mph, for distances up to 340 meters, aka 1000 feet. I was looking out at the jungle stretching in every direction, and I'm 100s of feet above it, the wind smacking my face for being fresh, and the mixture of fear and amazement is one hell of a drug. One of the slogans of the Gibbon Experience is "You don't need drugs...Remember, you are already very high." Of course, the employees make hippocrates of the organization.

You see, while the experience was amazing--living in a treehouse, zip-lining above the jungle, hiking jungle trails--the other aspects of the gibbon experience are seriously lacking. The "guides" speak almost no English, and do very little guiding. They were behind us during most of the hike, told us nothing about the local villages, culture, environment, flora or fauna. I don't think they knew anything to tell us, even if they had spoken English. They obviously hadn't been trained to any degree. They told us next to nothing about how to safely engage in zip-lining, and it was only by discussing it amongst ourselves that we really figured it out. We weren't given maps or any information about the surrounding region expect a few snippets about certain local animals. During guided walks to see the Gibbons, a guide led people into a bamboo dominated jungle area, which isn't even Gibbon habitat (another sign that they are not trained or knowledgable in the least). Food was provided, but at strange times (breakfast at 10AM, and dinner at 3 PM). We got the same food for every meal, consisting of several dishes of fried vegetables, and rice, extremely bland and apparently intended to cater to Western tastes, failing miserably and instead being bland crap. The water stopped running, and though we told the guides, they forgot. Two of our group had to zipline and hike to the guide's huts and ask them to fix it; the guides told them where the water tank was and how to fill it up, and made them do it themselves. The two guys at this point saw their various bongs and smoking paraphanalia for opium and likely weed smoking, which explained a lot. When the two guys went to fill up our water tank, they saw that the water was sourced from a local stream with no sanitation measures to purify or clean the water. I won't be surprised if we all end up with Ghiardia.

The Gibbon Experience markets itself as an Eco-Tourism project intended to support the local environment and people, but it does nothing for either. The local jungle is being cut down, burned and farmed at rapid rates--signs of these actions are everywhere. Obviously there is not sufficient action being taken to limit deforestation. Local villages looked as poor as I've seen anywhere in Asia. The workers were being paid roughly $2.50 US per day, while we were each paying $100 US per day for the experience, and there were 10 of us for 4 guides. Basically, it appears that Gibbon Experience is a fraud. It is an amazing experience for what it is: essentially, adventure tourism. But it is NOT eco-tourism or culturally or environmentally responsible.

In spite of the inspiration for this rant, the Gibbon Experience was awesome. It was like a childhood dream come true, and I had a big goofy smile on my face the whole time. The people we did the trip with were awesome, and we spent every evening playing cards listening to the three Canadian guys exchange hilarious banter. I would advise my friends to do the trip if they have the money to toss at a cool experience, but with the significant footnote of my above rant.