Zip-Lining, With Gibbons

It’s about 6:30 a.m. -- let’s say a quarter past dawn -- and I’m the last one out of my bedroll. At this hour I have no problem accepting the title of Laziest Gibbon Chaser in the Jungle.

I lift my mosquito net to see the other six occupants of Tree House Seven – Paul, Danielle, Connor, Michelle, Jamie and Denyse -- poised around the railing. No one is talking; hardly anyone is moving. It’s like a mime convention, minus any actual miming. No one acknowledges me as I stumble over to the railing, but I can read their thoughts: maybe some gibbons will show up, now that this lazy bastard is finally out of bed.

“Anybody see anything?” I whisper to no one in particular. Connor and Jamie look up and shake their heads. Almost a full day into The Gibbon Experience, and the gibbon count officially stands at zero.

I yawn, rub my eyes and move to get coffee, before remembering that the only available coffee is thick, cold, and more than twelve hours old.  So here I am, then: Up at dawn, coffee-less, standing in a jungle tree house, silently waiting for monkeys.

Really didn’t see this one coming.

I settle for the saddest of coffee substitutes in the form of a tin cup of warm water, squat on a wicker stool alongside my cohorts, and join the stare into the forest. After a few minutes I hear someone coming in on the zip line. It’s a group from another tree house, invading our space at a ridiculously early hour.

“Sounds like we have company,” Paul says.

“And I forgot to put out the good china.” Sorry, that’s the best sarcasm I can muster at 6:30 in the morning. “What, they don’t have gibbons on their side of the jungle?”

Of course we don’t have any gibbons on our side of the jungle either, my spiteful, non-caffeinated inner-voice starts to say, so ha-ha, the joke’s on them. Interloping, tree house-invading bastards. But my inner voice shuts up pretty quickly, because then we hear it.

It’s a sound I can only describe as a cross between a French ambulance siren from the 1960s, and car alarm going off in the middle of the night in Brooklyn. Between a haunting whale mating call, and a giant cicada stuck in your ear. It’s a noise few humans will ever get a chance to hear. And it’s really, really loud.

I’ll be damned. The gibbons really are singing.

 *         *          *

I liked the idea of the Gibbon Experience the first time I read about it, although I would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly what a gibbon was.

A non-profit organization was set up twenty years ago in the Bokeo Province of Laos to help villagers and local authorities fight illegal logging, animal poaching, slash-and-burn land mis-management, and other 21^st Century sins that were slowly destroying the natural habitat of rural Southeast Asia. In 2003 the group began building tree houses in the forest, with the idea of raising money for conservation by bringing in “low-impact tourism.” It convinced former poachers that they could make more money as guides for tourists looking for gibbons than they ever could hunting and killing them. Five years later the Lao government declared part of the Bokeo Forest to be a national park, the tree houses were connected with zip lines, and The Gibbon Experience was born.

The focus of all this attention, the black-crested gibbon (Nomacus Concolor, for those of you playing along at home in Latin), is a long-armed, critically endangered, monkey-like primate now only found in parts of Laos, northern Vietnam, and southern China. The gibbons eat fruit, live exclusively in the trees, mate for life, and in the mornings, they sing.

It’s not like Adele has anything to worry about. But yes, they actually do sing.

At last estimate there were only 1,300 to 2,000 of these gibbons left in the wild. Riding zip lines in the jungle to hear the singing gibbons seemed like as good of an excuse to go to Laos as any I could think of.

*          *          *

Just reaching the headquarters of The Gibbon Experience, however, is somewhat of an accomplishment itself. The office is located in Huay Xai (also known as Ban Houayxay, Huoeisay, or Houei Sai, depending on who’s drawing the map that day), a dusty, otherwise-nondescript river town in northern Laos. Huay Xai does have a small airport, so in theory you could probably fly here. But I of course have selected an overland route from Bangkok, which involves two trains, five buses, a couple of taxis, an international border crossing, and about half-dozen tuk-tuk rides of varying degrees of spleen-rupturing discomfort.   

At 8:15 a.m. the day of departure, The Gibbon Experience orientation room is filling up, and I’m getting worried. It’s not the idea of being driven into the jungle that unnerves me, it’s the question of which of the fifty or so Gibbon chasers gathered in Huay Xai are going to be my constant companions for the next three days.

I see a few women, and a couple of kids. But there seems to be an excessive amount of testosterone surging around the room. A loud group of Dutch kids the size of redwood trees are laughing and slapping at each other, occasionally knocking off a backward ball cap. Two guys to the left of me are having a conversation in Arabic. Behind me I hear German.  The guy to my right is with a group of fourteen male friends, traveling around Asia together after being discharged from the Israeli army. 

A Gibbon Experience employee has to shout over the car-crash of guttural languages to announce that a short safety video will now be shown, before we pile into the trucks and head off into the jungle. No one seems to be paying any attention. In a few hours we will all be suspended from a wire, flying at 60 miles per hour hundreds of feet off the ground. Maybe this is something you learn how to do as an Israeli paratrooper. Personally I’d appreciate a couple of pointers to avoid accidentally killing myself.

“You step into your safety harness like this,” says the smiling demonstration lady on the safety video. “Like you are stepping into a diaper.”

The Israeli guys understandably look each other like they must not have heard correctly. My thought is, if you have any first-hand experience wearing a diaper, this probably isn’t the trip for you.

“Attach the line like this,” demonstration lady continues. “Not like this.” A big red circle with a line through it flashes on the screen. “Like this is very dangerous.”

Like what? Like what is very dangerous?  I can’t hear because the loud German dad sitting behind me is still translating “diaper” for his 10-year-old daughter. By the time he shuts up we’re already on the closing credits. 

The video ends and the lights come up. “Any questions?” the employee asks. I’d ask if they could go over that “very dangerous” part again, but nobody wants to be that guy. “No questions? Okay, everyone in the truck!”

*          *          *         

While there are fifty people headed out into the jungle at the same time, thankfully not everyone is going to the same place. There is a relatively quick two-day tour, which promises more hiking with a higher degree of difficulty. Something, say, for your recently discharged military personnel on the go.

A waterfall tour is offered that goes farther into the jungle, also at the price of additional hiking.  And then there is the three-day “Classic Tour,” which promises less hiking, more tree house sitting, and (in theory) more chances to meet up with a gibbon.

Less hiking, more sitting. Sign me up for the lazy man’s gibbon tour.

By the time we split up there are about twenty two of us on the three-day classic tour, packed into three trucks and headed for the Nam Kam Forest. If you want to know how to get to the Nam Kam Forest, drive northeast out of Huay Xai on a twisty road for an hour and a half, stop at a little roadside shack that sells ice cream bars and whiskey with scorpions in the bottle, head downhill on a dirt road, drive through (not over, but literally through) a small river, and follow the canyon-sized, bone-jarring ruts for another hour, until you reach a small collection of shacks with naked children playing in the creek.

We’re not there yet. This is only where we get out of truck, and start hiking.

The hike starts out promisingly flat, albeit through a sun-baked rice field. It’s close to 100 degrees, and everyone is carrying a pack. By the time we reach the shade of the forest everyone is drenched in sweat. Now the serious hiking begins.

I know it’s impossible, but the hike seems to be straight uphill going, as well as coming back. Up over some rocks, up under some bamboo, up around some fallen trees.  If this is the easy program, I imagine the Israeli army guys on the two-day hike must be dropping like flies.

Another forty five minutes to an hour of uphill hiking, and we’re still not there yet. Now it’s time for the zip line.

*          *          *

No, of course I’ve never been on a zip line, and the proffered five-minute safety video has done nothing to convince me that I’m in any way prepared. Still, how hard can it be? You get hooked to a wire, you jump off of a tower. So simple a gibbon could do it.

Unless you do it wrong, and a big red circle with a line through it flashes over your life.

Our guide hands me a tangle of belts, straps and clips that is supposed to be my safety harness. It looks a bowl of pad see ew noodles I ate in Thailand three days ago. I slowly untangle the straps until they fall into a pattern I could plausibly identify as diaper shaped. 

No one is helping in any official capacity, and it occurs to me that this is the zip line equivalent of packing your own parachute. Put on your own damn safety harness. If you put it on wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself, do you? Didn’t you watch the safety video?

I step into my diaper/harness, pull a strap here, tighten a buckle there, and as best I can secure my crotch area for a flight over the jungle.

*          *          *

The initial zip line run is a complete leap of faith, in the same way I imagine it would be to bungee jump, or dive off a cliff in a flying squirrel costume.

It’s high. It’s long. The other end where you will theoretically land is nowhere in sight. One part of my brain tells me this doesn’t look like it could possibly work. Another part says that if there had been a rash of tourists plunging to their deaths from zip lines in northern Laos, I would have heard of it by now.

“Not necessarily,” the first part of my brain replies. “You saw how far the drive out here was. They could just roll up the bodies in banana leaves and no one would find out for years.” 

“Shut up. We’re already in the diaper harness. People are watching. We’re doing this.”

“It’s our funeral.”

I clip my harness to the zip line and step off the platform. In a split second the wire starts to hum, the ground below disappears, and I improbably find myself hundreds of feet above a jungle in Laos, sailing along like a flying squirrel.

*          *          *

I end up lucking out with my three-day jungle companions.  The Israeli paratroopers have wandered away on their own Bataan Death March. The Dutch teenagers are off in another tree house, presumably snapping each other with towels. Back at Tree House 7, my tree house mates and I are killing time after a day of jungle zipping playing Dave’s Gin (taught by yours truly), waiting for our guide to zip in with some food, and trying to figure out what the deal is with the bees.

Ah, the bees.

Forget man-eating tigers, poisonous snakes, or malaria-infected mosquitos. The biggest hazard to living in the jungle in Laos, improbably, turns out to the small swarm of bees inhabiting the tree house bathroom.

The “bathroom” is not an actual room, but an open platform located at the bottom level the tree house, directly across from the zip-line entrance. The bathroom facilities consist of a sink, a shower, and a squat toilet, all complete with a stunning panoramic view of the jungle. Because there is no actual “room” there is no actual “door,” either, just a cloth curtain that more or less blocks the view if someone happens to unexpectedly zip into the tree house while you’re in the bathroom, you know, brushing your teeth.

So here’s the thing about a squat toilet, located in a jungle, 100 feet in the air. The Laotians are not big believers in toilet paper; my impression is that they find the concept kind of disgusting. (And let’s be honest: they do have a point.) Instead, what you find in lieu of toilet paper – here and elsewhere in the country –is a spray hose.

All right, then. A little tough to get the hang of, but okay, I’m on board. We are after all in a tree house in Laos, not the Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay.

The problem we discover is that the spray hose, by necessity, has water in it. And for reasons I will let an entomologist explain, bees in the jungle really like water. They seem to be particularly fond of water that comes out of a squat toilet spray hose.

Which prompts the question, each time the need arises: how badly to I really have to go to the bathroom? Badly enough to risk being stung by a swarm of bees? You know, when you put it that way, maybe not. Maybe I’ll hang on, and just explode when I return to civilization. I think that sounds like a reasonable plan.

It’s as if the folks at the Ritz Carlton ran a few volts through the toilet seat, just to make things interesting.

This is the price you pay to hang with the gibbons.

*          *          *

After the first day or so the Tree House Seven become seasoned zip line veterans, grading each other’s landings like Russian judges at the Olympics. Come in too fast, you risk slamming into a tree. Come in too slow and you sputter to a stop way out on the wire, forcing you to pull hand over hand the rest of the way in, upside down like a spider monkey.

The spider monkey crawl is extremely humiliating, not to mention the high humidity, upper-body workout you really didn’t sign up for. Much better to hit the tree. Better still to glide in for the perfect two-point landing.

There has been a lot of hiking, a lot of laughing, a lot of sweating, and a lot of zipping about the jungle. But not, unfortunately, a lot of sightings of actual gibbons.

On the day we first hear the gibbons sing, the guide points to a broccoli-shaped tree, about 200 yards in the distance. I squint and see some branches moving. Those can’t possibly be the gibbons. The siren-like noise I’m hearing sounds like it’s coming from a public address system on the roof of the tree house.

Someone hands me a pair of binoculars, and I look back at the broccoli tree. Sure enough, there they are: long armed black silhouettes, swinging back and forth on branches, and singing as they go.

*          *          *

About ten years ago, I went on a whale watching boat trip up the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada. After the tour boat had taken our money and pushed off the dock, the guides immediately started hedging their bets to tamp down any inflated expectations about actually seeing any whales on the whale watching boat trip. 

“You know, zee humback and zee minke whales can be very shy,” our adorable French-Canadian whale guide announced to the boat through a portable microphone. “Sometimes we will not zee deese whales for many days.”

Many days, huh? Oh well. For fifty bucks, I guess you still get a nice boat ride.

Yet despite the disclaimers, within a half hour a monstrous tail fin flipped out of the water, less than fifty feet from the port side of the boat. Geysers erupted out of blowholes on the starboard. People ran from side to side, yelling and pointing cameras. Against all odds we had somehow hit the minke whale mother load. Our guide began babbling in barely intelligible Franglish, like Celine Dion had just won the Mega Millions jackpot.

“We never zee such tings like this,” she choked out, on the verge of tears. “We are really, really, really, very rotten spoiled.”

*          *          *

I think about the minke whale explosion as I sit in Laos watching the swinging silhouettes through the binoculars. No, the gibbons are not exactly hanging out with us in the tree house. But I can see them, albeit from a distance. And I damn sure can hear them.

So maybe we are only mildly rotten spoiled. But still.

There are less than 2,000 of these long-armed, branch-swinging, monogamous, musically inclined primates left on the planet. And I’m one of a handful of people on Earth that will ever be close enough in a forest to hear them sing.

I have to think that alone is worth the price of the boat ride.

*          *          *

We’ve spent three days in the jungle, hiking and zipping and spotting the occasional gibbon in the distance. The prospect of the trip back is disheartening, because after a bone-jarring hour over a rutted dirt road, followed by a drive through a river, a stop at the ice cream/scorpion whiskey store, and an hour and a half drive on a twisty Laotian highway, we’ll be back in grungy Huay Xai, instead of on our way to meet the gibbons.

We stuff the Tree House Seven into the back of a single tuk tuk, along with our back packs, and (for reasons never fully explained) several bags of rice. There are liters of Beer Lao to lessen the pain of leaving, and a satisfaction of knowing that, even if we do nothing else the rest of our lives, at least we’ve done this.

“I have the feeling that in ten years time this road will be paved,” Paul says, holding a bottle of beer as our tuk-tuk bounces us back toward semi-civilization. “There will be a big neon sign at the turn off, pointing the tourists toward the ticket booth at the entrance to Gibbon Land.”

He might be right. Personally I could do without the hoards of tourists, the neon signs, and even the paved road. But I do hope that in ten years’ time the gibbons will be still here. Singing their bizarre car-alarm siren songs, and swinging in their broccoli trees, hundreds of yards from the tree house.